Cooper Compression Changes its Approach to Business Communications with Cisco Partner eNETsolutions
March 1, 2005
By Cindy McDowell, News@Cisco
eNETsolutions is a Cisco® Premier Certified and SMB-Select Partner with a specialization in Internet Protocol (IP) Communications. With strong roots in data networking, the company started focusing on voice and video several years ago when it realized how these technologies can positively affect a business.
"Our goal is to help companies make positive changes in how they conduct business communications," says Chris Laflin, vice president of sales and marketing for eNETsolutions. "We also help our customer take ownership of their new system so they can more easily and effectively administer and maintain it themselves."
Cooper Compression is a division of Cooper Cameron Corporation, a leading international manufacturer of oil and gas pressure control and compression equipment. The company was relocating its corporate headquarters and Roland Etcheverry, vice president of IT for Cooper Compression, was challenged with purchasing a new phone system to replace the existing 10-year old Private Branch Exchange (PBX)-based system, in addition to implementing a call center and IP faxing solution.
"The whole project focused on finding the right call center because we were not effectively managing our after-market sales and customers were reporting that they'd be on hold for a long time or had been dropped off the system," says Etcheverry. "We were losing money because of our sales management."
Etcheverry and his team looked at different communications solutions for the five major sites and the 25 smaller sites that would be included in the new system roll out. They found the price of IP telephony to be competitive with a new PBX system. Chuck Burg, information technology manager for the headquarters site did two return on investment (ROI) analyses for an IP Communications system. The new system helped to enable an increase in sales, which showed a rapid payoff for the project; a second analysis showed savings associated with the conference-calling feature that made it possible for Cooper Compression to forgo the need for an external bridge to handle conference calls.
Avaya, Cooper Cameron's previous provider of PBX phone equipment, fought hard to keep the business.
"We challenged Cooper Compression to consider the Cisco solution by explaining how making this change could impact the way that their company communicates forever," says Laflin. "We wanted to open their eyes to what is possible using IP Communications." To do this, Laflin and his team's pitch went beyond listing phone features to include information about the use of call centers across time zones that are invisible to end users. They also discussed how to unleash the power of Cooper Compression's WAN while presenting convincing ROI numbers. "We challenged management to change and they responded," he says.
eNETsolutions recommended a Cisco IP Communications solution for Cooper Compression including IP phones and Cisco UnityTM 4.0 for unified messaging. Interstar's XMediusFAX was chosen to implement IP faxing.
"We typically prefer to work with bigger companies, and the competing bid on this project was 10 times the size of eNETsolutions," says Etcheverry. "But we were confident that the eNETsolutions team understood our business and knew IP communications technology inside and out. With Cisco standing behind them, we were 100 percent confident that the project would come together smoothly."
The Cooper Compression team and eNETsolutions Cisco specialists were then faced with their biggest challenge of the project: the short timeframe for deployment. Once the contract was signed, eNETsolutions had just five days to get the system live before all of the employees moved into the new headquarters.
"Everyone pulled together as a team to make it happen," says Laflin. "The internal Cooper Compression staff, our Cisco specialists, and the local Cisco account manager were all instrumental in meeting the tight deployment deadline. When the staff moved in on Monday morning, there was a dial tone at every desk."
Besides the IP Communications phone system helping to improve communications internally for employees, the new Cisco CallManager call center solution is improving business.
"Our business is unique in that we have some legacy product lines and a limited number of people who can offer broad support," says Etcheverry. "The new system offers automatic call distribution which better utilizes our staff." In addition, the automatic call distribution helps ensure that no customer service calls are missed.
"In our business, a customer is calling because their equipment is down and they need to place an order," says Etcheverry. "If we miss those calls, we miss orders, and that affects revenue."
The new call center system comes with reporting functions that provide daily, weekly, and monthly reports for the call center so the Cooper Compression team can easily access important information like the number of calls received, the wait times, dropped calls, and status times, and make adjustments as necessary.
The success Cooper Compression is realizing with its new IP Communications solutions is something eNETsolutions strives for daily.
"We have implemented communications solutions that have opened up enormous business opportunities that can be adopted globally," says Laflin. "IP Communications is a tremendous growth opportunity — businesses are really starting to accept IP technology because it's affordable at the enterprise level and at the SMB level as well."
Cindy McDowell is a freelance journalist located in Santa Cruz, CA.
