Business overview
Christian Brothers Services (CBS) is a nonprofit organization that administers employee benefit and other programs along with consulting services to Catholic organizations across the US. For over 60 years, CBS has offered a wide range of services, including health, property/casualty insurance, retirement planning, risk management, school management, and outsourced IT support.
Building relationships is at the heart of its mission, and CBS provides personalized support to each client and program member. When CBS needed to replace aging on-premises systems, it was the 8x8 team’s careful understanding of the organization’s needs that set CBS up with a cloud-first communications partner for the future.
The challenge: finding the right cloud-first provider
The operations team at CBS supports 280 employees across the country and outsources IT services everywhere possible to gain related benefits. To better improve IT service delivery and manage costs, the team moved their on-premises data center to the cloud in 2016. “This greatly reduced maintenance and capital expenses,” says CIO Tom Drez. “We could still administer all our systems in the same way as before. We just no longer needed to see them to administer them.” This project was the first that defined CBS’s CloudFirst approach going forward.
With this first major cloud project completed, CBS then began a top-down review of all its communications systems, including on-premises PBX’s in all office locations, contact center, and fax, soliciting input company-wide on requirements. Two criteria were top of mind for the operations team.
First, CBS wanted to reduce complexity and effort by moving to a single-vendor solution. “We liked 8x8 because they write all their own software,” says Tom Drez. “They can upgrade on their own schedule, and we don’t have to worry about integration testing.”
Secondly, the team preferred vendors with a similar relationship focus as CBS. “Some had a cookie-cutter approach,” says ITS Operations Supervisor Brian Dwyer. “We could tell that their proposal was not tailored to us. 8x8 took the time to listen, evaluate our unique situation, and come up with the best solution for us.”
The solution: new opportunities for collaboration and efficiency
CBS rolled out 8x8 X Series, which includes 8x8 Work and 8x8 Contact Center across its workforce in 2019. “8x8 was very easy to implement,” says Tom Drez. “We had no on-prem equipment to deploy other than some endpoints.” During implementation, 8x8 engineers were on hand to answer questions and help troubleshoot or make any customizations needed.
