Transcript:
Chris Frey:
My name is Chris Frey, and I am Vice President of Cloud & Contact Center here with Converged Technology Professionals. And with me today is Barry Jondahl, director of IT operations at SKYGEN USA. Barry, thanks again for being with us here today. We have a full house of guests that I'm sure will be interested in hearing about the changes at SKYGEN. Are you ready for us to get going?
Barry Jondahl:
Yes. I'm ready, Chris. Thank you.
Chris Frey:
Can you start off by giving us a little bit of background on what SKYGEN is all about?
Barry Jondahl:
Yeah. Sure. Well, SKYGEN is a business on the technical side. So, we have a technical side of our business and an operations side of our business. And on the technical side of things, we develop software for medical, dental, and vision to transact benefits and do benefits management between healthcare providers and insurance businesses.
So, both government and on the commercial side of things. And then on the operations side, we actually run those systems and will perform what we call third party administration of those benefits managements for our clients. So, wecan provide software in a SaaS environment, turnkey environment, or we can run it and host it for you.
Chris Frey:
Okay. Along with the subject matter that you deal with, can you speak a little bit about what is SKYGEN sort of by the numbers so we can get an idea of the overall size and scope of the organization?
Barry Jondahl:
Yeah. Sure. So, we're a business. We're located in Mequon, Wisconsin, which is a suburb pretty much of the Milwaukee area. So Southeast Wisconsin area. We have four campuses in the area, two of which are in Mequon and two of which are in an adjacent town just west, Menomonee Falls.
And then we have about 730 employees across the board. Not all of those employees are in Wisconsin, some are throughout the United States, but that's the relative size of the business.
Chris Frey:
So you undertook this decision to take your communications to the cloud. And what were some of the driving forces that led you down that path?
Barry Jondahl:
Yeah. So, there were a couple things that drove us down that path. One was, it was the call center in that we had an on-prem ShoreTel based system and it was getting a little older, but really it limited us in what we could do relative to perhaps opening call centers throughout the United States.
So, we were fairly landlocked in how we would be able to distribute the telephone applications and the complexity around that. So that was one thing the business was asking. "Hey. If we wanted to open up a call center somewhere outside of Wisconsin, what would we need to do?" So that was one key driver for it. Business continuity, disaster recovery was another big driver, big decision maker for us there.
But yeah. Those were the key things, both business and on the technology side that really prompted us to move away from that on-prem to a cloud-based system.
Chris Frey:
So as you started this process, I'm sure you got some insight from various users within the business. Were there any major directives that the business wanted you to focus on in terms of selecting an appropriate vendor?
Barry Jondahl:
Yeah. So, what we did was we did a comparison. So, we had two vendors, RingCentral, of course, was the one we selected, but there was another vendor in play there and both had very similar capabilities.
And so it was a decision that we made based on just a few factors with the performance and the recommendations, all the research that we did, the Gartner, everything that we looked at, we found that both vendors were pretty much even, but then when it came to some other things, being that we're in the healthcare field, high trust and having a high trust certification that RingCentral had really put them on top and I think that was one of the key decisions was security.
We're processing a lot of personal healthcare information and security is very important to us. So the platform had to be secure and it had to meet our high trust standards and that was a key driver from our business. Before we did anything, it had to be very secure.
Chris Frey:
So just as a follow-up to that, where did stability rank on the order of importance?
Barry Jondahl:
Yeah. Of course, it had to be a stable thing because at the time, well it was just prior to COVID really becoming a thing here in the United States, but we wanted to have the diversity of the platform. That was a key driver.
Security was a key driver, but then when COVID hit and we had to send people home, that platform in of itself, because we do have a call center of over 100 customer service people. And we literally packed up their desktops, packed up their phones, and sent them home.
While those folks were at home, we implemented the RingCentral platform. So, it had to work and it had to work seamlessly with our IVR, with our systems. We have virtualized systems; we have physical system.
Barry Jondahl:
So all of that had to work. It had to plug and play, and we had to do it in almost real-time on a Monday morning. So, we tested all that. We didn't have any issues with stability throughout the testing phases. No indication of outage, slowness, performance, nothing really bubbled up and we tested it for several months.
So, we felt pretty good, but you never know until you put everybody on the system and we've been on the system since December of 2020 and it's been a good experience for us. We haven't had any outages that I can think of. A couple of bumps on implementation day, but those were expected with porting 800 numbers over and that sort of thing.
But yeah. Stability is very important and fortunately it's been very stable so far.
Chris Frey:
So you mentioned a few bumps during the installation and every implementation has some hurdles that you have to overcome. We all like to learn from each other's mistakes. Can you talk a little bit about any hurdles that SKYGEN had to deal with during their install?
Barry Jondahl:
Sure. Yeah. It's been a while now, but I do recall a couple key things. One was the 800 number transfers. So, as you're moving those across the PSTN into a different telco, because we did move those over to RingCentral from our current telco.
There's always a chance that something goes awry. I believe we had over 100 800 numbers and there's always a chance, but what we did was we had engineers that were available to us so that while that transfer was occurring, if any of the numbers didn't ring properly or weren't directed properly, we had the engineer on the phone and we were able to get that fixed. So literally those handful of 800 issues that we had were resolved in minutes.
Barry Jondahl:
So we continued to meet our SLAs, our client SLAs, and the outages were very, very short. And so that was one thing we experienced. The other thing we experienced was just a little bit on the training side of things. It was very difficult too.
We were in COVID protocol at that time. We didn't have the ability to bring everybody into a training session. So, we did a lot of remote training. We used a lot of documentation that was provided with RingCentral and some folks did well with that and others didn't do so well.
And so, implementation week was a strain for my team a little bit and the help desk team, which received a lot of calls. "How do I do this? I'm not sure what that's going to do."
Barry Jondahl:
And so I would recommend that people get out in front of that a little bit and spend some time ensuring that the users are fully trained and capable of using the system. But those are the two things that I remember being a little bumpy there, but we got through it very quick. Week two, it was a non-event at that point.
Chris Frey:
That's not bad. I mean, being able to get through those hurdles and full operation in a short time for the size and scope and nature of your business, that's very impressive. With the move to cloud, we often see organizations move away from the physical desk phones. Was there also some type of shift of this nature at SKYGEN?
Barry Jondahl:
We had physical desk phones before with the ShoreTel platform and everybody had one on their desk. And so, we went ahead, and we ordered physical desk phones for everybody, including those at the call center.
And one of the reasons we did that, especially for the call center, was most of the call center agents who are the primary users of the phone, they use it more than anybody in our business. Their desktops are on a virtualized platform and the soft phone at the time wasn't quite ready for virtualization and running on a virtualized platform.
So, we just took a cautious direction there and put physical phones in and those phones worked out of the box. It was a bit of a challenge logistically to intake the phones, configure the phones, get them back sent out, because again, we were in COVID and with remote workers we didn't want people coming into the office.
Barry Jondahl:
So we had to ship things out. And I guess that was another little bit of our hiccup there on week one where that some people didn't receive the phone, shipping got lost. It was in December, so it was around the holiday time and that came into play as well. But yeah. We went with physical phones, and we did lease them. So, we did not purchase them, which I think gives us some flexibility too. So if we do decide to go with a virtualized or an application phone, we can just simply turn in the leased phone at that point.
Chris Frey:
Are there any other lessons that you've learned from this experience that you feel that you'd like to share with your colleagues here today?
Barry Jondahl:
Well I was surprised at how quickly people adapted to the mobile application. And it was like the first day or two people were asking, "Hey. How do I install this on my personal cell phone and how do I get access?"
And given the situation that we're in with remote and a lot of mobile type workers, that mobile app really came into play both from a messaging perspective, a phone perspective and I was a little surprised at how quickly adoption was taken with the mobile because I don't believe we had that capability with ShoreTel.
At least maybe partly we could take some calls and things, but it was something that I think was a pent-up demand that we had and we discovered it once we launched, once we went live. And it continues to be a big part of our way of business is using those mobile apps.
Chris Frey:
Barry, does your organization use Microsoft Teams today?
Barry Jondahl:
We do. Yep. And it's used primarily on the development side of our business, where we communicate with the inner development team and the offshore developers. It's a primary mode of communication with that group.
Chris Frey:
Was there concern that you'd have too many applications doing the same thing within your company ecosystem at the same time?
Barry Jondahl:
It definitely came up and we did have another web conferencing application that we were using, a commercial one, not Microsoft Teams. And we did intend to replace that one. That particular platform wasn't as stable as we wanted it to be.
And given that we had moved primarily to web conferencing configuration with everybody being remote and people were pretty, on a regular basis, getting cut off and losing their connection, unable to hear, performance, screens freezing, that sort of thing. We wanted to move on with that, but the Microsoft Teams, they wanted to stay with that, and we have implemented the RingCentral messenger app and the RingCentral office platform basically, which has the web conferencing and all the messaging and everything.
And the two systems just coexist with one. Another people do have a choice on which one they want to use. The de facto one is the RingCentral. But yeah. We've had no issues with the two communication applications coexisting.
Chris Frey:
I appreciate your candor on the topic because we spend an awful lot of time talking about Microsoft Teams and trying to help businesses figure out what's going to be the right path forward and everybody really wants to get it right. Nobody wants to make any mistakes in this area.
So I'm sure that every attendee here is happy, not happy, but excited to hear about what you have to say in that topic because it seems like everyone wants to know what each other are doing, especially with the size and scope of your environment.
Chris Frey:
So we talked about some of the key benefits and drivers and we mentioned stability, we mentioned high trust. What about financial? Without maybe going into gory details, has this been a positive financial impact on the business?
Barry Jondahl:
Yeah. Most definitely. And it was a surprise for me. So I thought that we had a fairly economical platform, but as it turned out, when we did the ROI on RingCentral, the return was pretty quick. I won't go into the gory details on that, but I can tell you, if you do, just do a cost benefit analysis and do an ROI within your own organizations.
I did work with our finance department. So I looked at all of our spend across the board for all the applications that we're running on ShoreTel, web conferencing applications. If you kind of throw it all in the mix and then compare it to what you're going to get with RingCentral, you might be surprised in what you find out.
Barry Jondahl:
And I was, and we do track it. So, I know our CFO is very interested in our spend in that area and I talked to him about it and we keep tabs on it. And so, it's been a positive ROI and it will be, it will continue to be one for us. So yeah. That was another key driver too for getting us off of the ShoreTel onto the RingCentral system.
Chris Frey:
So I'd like to pivot here and talk a little bit about the role of the partner and traditionally the partner, people like us. We work with you in a very direct manner through the sales and implementation process. And generally, the manufacturer is just part of the supporting cast. How did you see those roles change with the move to cloud?
Barry Jondahl:
Well, I mean, if you think back Chris. So you guys helped me with the evaluation and selecting the vendor. I'm not a telephone expert by any stretch and you folks are. And so, I leveraged your expertise in helping me make that decision.
So that part, as consultants and trusted advisors, greatly appreciated that. But then even beyond that, through the implementation I had yourself and another one of your employees there as project management. And so, you were with me through the entire process, making sure that things were done appropriately. Again, I do have a telecom admin.
He's very capable, but he too doesn't have all of the telco experience and that sort of thing that you would need.
Barry Jondahl:
So I brought you guys along with and you were involved in those meetings. You did the project management for me. We were shorthanded in our business. I couldn't pull an internal project manager there.
So together, I think, might have been a little unusual to do that project management piece, but I think together we pulled it off and I greatly appreciated that. And then even today, after implementation, I do call on you folks, not as much as I used to, but certainly you're involved in the things that we're doing. I've got Steve Doerr sitting in on my monthly meetings with RingCentral.
He's part of that team. So, he stays engaged. You guys stay engaged on those things and if we need you, I know you guys are there. So, I just rely on that experience that you have, and I will continue to do so.
Chris Frey:
A lot of businesses are very unsure about how the role of the partners going to be in the future. And so, it's very important for us and I appreciate your feedback on that and telling all of our attendees how we fit into this mix. Barry, that's all the questions I have for you today. I really appreciate your time and we'll turn it back over to the winery event.
Barry Jondahl:
Great. Thanks Chris.