The Customer
With a large sales force in the United States and Canada, Ganz designs, manufactures, and markets several lines of home décor, gift, and home fragrance products for specialty retailers worldwide.
With a large sales force in the United States and Canada, Ganz designs, manufactures, and markets several lines of home décor, gift, and home fragrance products for specialty retailers worldwide.
Business Challenges
Renowned for its design, style, and trend leadership, Ganz’s long-term goal was to connect all its administrative sites, call centers, warehouses, and distribution sites across the United States, with the first centralized directory located in Elkin, North Carolina. This would allow them to call an extension anywhere in the company. With 15 sites involved in the new phone system, Ganz wanted to gather input from several departments across the country. “We discovered that the telecommunications sector is complex, with each provider using its own terminology for everything, even when referring to the same things,” explains project manager Todd Little. “So we asked users from several departments to contribute to the process. We asked them: ‘From your perspective, what is most important in a phone system, based on your role?’” Several consistent factors emerged from the varied responses, including ease of use, the ability to access voicemail from mobile devices and tablets, and the availability of call queues and ring groups.
The responses, included as line items in a weighted matrix where priorities were rated on a scale of one to ten according to their importance, gave Ganz a starting point and allowed them to compare apples to apples. In the preliminary weighted comparison analysis, Little added some expectations from the IT team. These weighted priorities included flexibility and ease of implementation (since connecting the 15 sites would happen in progressive phases rather than all at once), the decision to enter into a maintenance contract with a provider or maintain the system in-house, and cost. They reviewed systems from several major providers. After a team member suggested Sangoma, they added Switchvox to their list of solutions. Ganz then entered all the phone solutions into the grid so they could compare the overall scores for their main priorities with the telecom offerings. Sangoma and another provider scored in the high seventieth percentile range as the ideal solution.
Solutions From Sangoma
Ganz had an IP infrastructure but spent about three months installing new cables and setting up a separate connectivity network at the Elkin facility. They purchased 85 D‑Series IP phones and a Switchvox appliance capable of supporting all their users — an ideal choice for call center operations.
Ganz had an IP infrastructure but spent about three months installing new cables and setting up a separate connectivity network at the Elkin facility. They purchased 85 D‑Series IP phones and a Switchvox appliance capable of supporting all their users — an ideal choice for call center operations.
The Results
“We saw immediate savings… [and] the technical support was excellent, helping us install [the new phones], although we really liked the ease of use, requiring little or no training.” The integrated feature set makes it easy for employees to access all their contacts, make calls, and access queues directly from the phone interface. “From a maintenance standpoint, these phones save us time because they can be preconfigured from Switchvox,” explains Little. Since the firmware is updated automatically, once the technician places a phone on an employee’s desk, they never need to touch it again. “We really like these phones and we will deploy more as we continue building the site-to-site dial network connecting the 15 sites.”
“We saw immediate savings… [and] the technical support was excellent, helping us install [the new phones], although we really liked the ease of use, requiring little or no training.” The integrated feature set makes it easy for employees to access all their contacts, make calls, and access queues directly from the phone interface. “From a maintenance standpoint, these phones save us time because they can be preconfigured from Switchvox,” explains Little. Since the firmware is updated automatically, once the technician places a phone on an employee’s desk, they never need to touch it again. “We really like these phones and we will deploy more as we continue building the site-to-site dial network connecting the 15 sites.”