Warehouse Discount Center Drums Up New Capabilities and Instant ROI

Warehouse Discount Center

Background

Since 1982, Warehouse Discount Center (WDC) has evolved into one of Southern California’s largest independently-owned home appliance, plumbing, and water systems retailers. The company has seven locations throughout the greater Los Angeles area, representing dozens of top manufacturers in the home appliance market. The problem was that each of its stores had disparate phone systems that couldn’t “talk” to each other, some without even basic features such as voice mail and direct extensions. The company had been using a basic deployment of Vertical Communication’s Wave IP unified communications system at its Agoura Hills, California, headquarters and was ready to invest in a companywide solution that could provide the Wave’s enhanced capabilities to all of its locations.

“Our main goal was to inter-connect our stores to cut phone service costs, streamline communications and increase productivity,” said Greg Bloom, IT manager at Warehouse Discount Center. “The Wave IP was a terrific asset to our main office. We wanted to deliver some of the same capabilities to our branches, while still locating most of the PBX functions at headquarters to serve as our communications focal point.”

Solution

Warehouse Discount Center has maintained a long-term relationship with Blue Chip, a voice and data solution provider serving the Los Angeles area for 25 years. After evaluating several options, WDC’s IT team followed Blue Chip’s recommendation to build onto its existing Wave IP architecture. By simply reconfiguring the voice and data circuits of the Wave at the company’s headquarters, Blue Chip was able to connect and extend all of the system’s features and functionality to WDC’s other six locations for seamless, enterprise-wide communications.

As part of the solution, Blue Chip also implemented the Wave IP Global Manager central management application, which runs on Microsoft’s® scalable SQL Server. Wave Global Manager provided WDC with a simple and efficient way to manage its voice and data communications throughout its network of stores from a single location. With it, administrators can schedule and implement software updates, upgrades, and patches selectively or enterprise-wide from WDC headquarters, dramatically decreasing administrative time and eliminating the cost, disruptions, and inconsistencies that occur when software is installed one site at a time.

Wave Global Manager also enables centralized, automated backup of data from local sites, ensuring full recovery of business data and store operations in case of disaster or network disruption. The application also enables a variety of reporting and archiving features, including trunk and traffic statistics and call accounting, to give WDC greater insight and control over its telecommunications and business operations, and most importantly, costs.

Of particular value to WDC is the ability to quickly create, update, and push special vendor ad campaigns to customers using the Wave’s built-in voice messaging interface. With it, employees can easily record and update promotional details—either from headquarters or by individual store location—at a moment’s notice.

Results

Once all of WDC’s stores were on a single phone system, costs for calls between locations were eliminated. That alone saved the company a considerable sum per month. In fact, “The savings gained by unifying the system was substantial enough to cover the cost for implementing the new system,” noted Ron Herman, president of Blue Chip, providing WDC with an immediate return on investment.

In addition, Wave IP was able to support digital phones in areas where WDC felt VoIP was not necessary. This translated into even more savings, as well as an easier installation.

Through its updated Vertical Wave IP solution, WDC can now communicate as a cohesive organization. Since Wave IP’s architecture has a robust feature set, employees had little trouble adapting to the new technology and now enjoy long-awaited features such as store-to-store direct dialing with 4-digit extensions and companywide voicemail. System management is streamlined, and the company has the capability to add new communications tools whenever it chooses. And WDC can now spotlight various promotions with customized advertising messages for customers on hold.

“We’re more than happy with the productivity we’re now leveraging through the Vertical solution,” said WDC’s Bloom. “It’s much easier to manage calls between stores, and the ability to advertise specials through our outgoing hold messages gives us a new and cost-effective marketing tool.”

“It was a win-win situation,” added Blue Chip’s Herman. “The customer was pleased that we could bring high-performance VoIP to the table and make it affordable. WDC got more capabilities for less cost.”