The Challenge
When the Washington, DC region shut down in March 2020, many organizations scrambled to reorient their everyday business practices to a distributed workforce. How do you handle basic everyday operations like fielding important phone calls when no one is in the office?
At the start of the pandemic, the DC-based boutique accounting firm RoseMcKenna, PLLC faced just such a question, as the 13 employees of their dynamic downtown office were sent home by a city mandate meant to curb the spread of COVID-19.
In an industry and city in which direct personal contact is a keystone of their client services, the leadership at RoseMcKenna had to figure out how to keep employees connected to their clients and to one another. But of course, this isn’t just a connection issue. Any solution must necessarily allow employees to connect to one another in a way that plugs into their existing workflow. It also needs to preserve the organization’s brand recognition and client trust even when employees are dialing in from personal devices and computers spread across the DC region.
The Solution
Enter Voice over Internet Protocol – VoIP. A technology that has been around for more than two decades, VoIP (which is essentially phone calls over the internet) has improved dramatically in the past few years. These days it provides high quality phone service in a scalable package. VoIP services can also easily be combined with other cloud-based solutions to create a comprehensive communications package.
“When we started the transition to VOIP before the pandemic, we couldn’t quite realize how invaluable it would be to answer calls from anywhere – without anyone needing to be in the office. The whole staff really appreciates the ability to answer, transfer, and forward calls through the app if we need to.”
Jolie Johnson, Director of Operations, RoseMcKenna
At RoseMcKenna, the organization was already considering the shift to VoIP before the pandemic turned the world upside down. The firm had migrated much of its IT infrastructure to the cloud by early 2020. However, the demands of a distributed work force made necessary by the region-wide shutdown provided both incentive and opportunity to migrate their phone services to VoIP with Allied Telecom.
The Results
With the move to VoIP, RoseMcKenna can provide both employees and customers with a cohesive solution that allows everyone to stay connected. This integrated service allows staff to make calls from the application on their cell phones, on their computers, or from office handsets and always have RoseMcKenna’s official number show up on caller ID, building brand recognition and trust with existing and potential customers alike. The service also integrates seamlessly with Microsoft Teams and Outlook, tools that RoseMcKenna was already using, supporting both staff and leadership’s ability to work collaboratively no matter what their geographic proximity.
The shift to VoIP took approximately 10 days for integration into their current system. And because much of the team’s work was already cloud-based, the learning curve for the new system and its intuitive interface was relatively shallow. From an employee perspective, the transition meant adding an app to the mobile device that they use for work as well as to their computers. For administrators, the process is a bit more involved, but not much. RoseMcKenna upgraded their network bandwidth and ported their numbers over from the previous service provider.
The implementation of a new cloud-based phone system has already returned results both in terms of staff effectiveness and on the bottom line. While RoseMcKenna continues to operate a hybrid office model, their investment in VoIP now means that they will be ready to quickly adapt to the many potential configurations of work environments that could be in their future. And to top it all, they’re saving approximately 20% over their previous phone service.
Interested in making the switch to VoIP?