Communication, whether on the road or in the office, is key to
Shimano American, a maker and seller of high-end biking and
fishing products.
But the company needed a way to migrate from its old telecom
system to
IP without disrupting operations and, more important, with a
level of cost savings. Shimano wanted its road-warrior sales and
marketing reps, and other on-the-go employees, to be able to
communicate and message more effectively, essentially enhancing
customer service through tighter
collaboration and communications.
"We needed to find a way to let salespeople communicate more
efficiently with customers," said Bill Crane, Shimano American's
communications manager. "When they travel all the time, that's
pretty difficult."
The company's previous phone system provided some basic
capabilities for placing calls, but it lacked additional features
that would allow customers and co-workers to reach others while on
the road, and it was missing now-necessary collaboration
components.
Sales and marketing reps frequently call on retailers and
distributors to demo and sell products. If a salesperson is hard to
reach, the company's chances of a key sale could be ruined. Teams
of reps also need to collaborate with one another in real time
despite constantly changing work locations. They also need to
quickly and easily reach co-workers back at the home office.
Crane began looking into
unified messaging systems. Having researched various vendors,
he evaluated Siemens HiPath OpenScape. By the end of 2005,
OpenScape, along with HiPath Xpressions and HiPath 4000, were
deployed.
Siemens calls OpenScape a presence-aware, real-time unified
communications software suite. It gives a single view of all users
and devices and uses presence awareness to alert users to the best
way to reach others. Xpressions, a unified messaging app, combines
voice, fax and email messages on a Windows server. The HiPath 4000
is an IP convergence platform built with a distributed
architecture.
Since deploying unified communications and messaging
capabilities, Shimano American has seen a boost in collaboration
among teams in the field and workers in the home office, Crane
said. Mobile sales and marketing teams, the original drivers for
the solutions, are easier to reach (irrespective of location), he
noted, and customer service has steadily improved, acting as a
catalyst for an increase in overall sales.
"We went into the whole concept as a mobility thing, but
realised maybe it's connectivity that's a bigger issue," Crane
said.
Because Shimano had been a Siemens user for a number of years,
the process of cutting over to IP from an older communications
switch was smooth. That ease of migration, Crane said, played a
major role in Shimano's ultimate decision to run with HiPath.
"We looked at several other vendors' systems, but because we
already had a Siemens switch in place, it involved very little
change to convert over to IP," he said. "This was a logical
extension of our phone system."
Crane said all of the company's voicemail, messaging, calling
features and automatic call distribution systems are now housed
within the same IP-based platform, making it easier to manage.
Shimano first launched a pilot program, rolling out unified
communications capabilities to about 25 people. Overall, the plan
is to send it out to hundreds more by year's end. Crane said he's
working with Siemens to develop support and education for sales and
marketing reps using the new applications.
"Unified communications allows us to forward calls automatically
to cell phones so that a person on the road can get calls any time
they want; they're always available," Crane said. "With the
presence-aware feature, we can see if someone is available at any
time to receive a call."
Presence awareness was something of a surprise, Crane said. He
knew it would be useful, but now it's taken off.
"Presence awareness has become huge," he said. "Being able to
know people are there before you call them, it's been very
valuable."
No concrete numbers are available yet, he said, but the company
expects the system to generate an increase in sales because of
better contact with customers, which will increase ROI.
"Being able to take care of something right now is better than
having to deal with it later," Crane said of the boosted
productivity that has led to better sales. "We have a sense we're
supporting customers better. We're increasing [our] availability …
to our customers." Check out some additional VoIP case studies Read
about Microsoft's unified communications strategy