“When I said that I just needed phone service, that’s exactly what 8x8 provided,” says Jordan Reinhardt, Director of Information Services at RelateCare. “They didn’t try to upsell at a time when I’m working to solve a problem. That’s what builds trusted partnerships.”
For Reinhardt and his IT organization, that trusted partnership gave them the agility to support an important new client—even when the pandemic hit—while keeping setup and maintenance costs low.
RelateCare began in 2009 as a joint venture between Rigneydolphin, a contact center outsourcing company based in Waterford, Ireland, and the Cleveland Clinic of Ohio. The partners built a contact center practice within the Cleveland Clinic that grew to become a model of innovation in healthcare access.
Today, RelateCare provides a wide range of services, such as appointment scheduling, telehealth, nurse triage, referrals and authorizations, consulting services and more, to healthcare organizations around the world.
With locations in the US and Ireland, Reinhardt’s team is responsible for IT operations company-wide. They support staff, who work primarily in the office, as well as consulting nurses who work remotely from home or other locations.
The challenge: integrating with a client’s phone system
A new client wanted RelateCare staff to use their phone system, but the client was unable to provide additional licensing or equipment to get them set up. In addition, the client’s current solution couldn’t support VoIP connections.
Reinhardt and team needed to come up with a way to deploy physical phones to the remote staff while maintaining one consistent form of connectivity between nurses and contact center agents. However, their infrastructure at the time could not support physical phones without having the additional VPN gateways and extensive setup required in order for those phones to connect.
As Reinhardt says, “The costs were excessive, just on the VPN solution alone, well over $80,000 a year to support phone service. That was cost prohibitive for us when there are more effective solutions such as 8x8 available in the cloud that do not require additional maintenance and administrative resources.”
The solution: Cloud PBX service and Polycom devices
Reinhardt reached out to Lantana Communications, RelateCare’s systems integration partner, for help with investigating cloud-based solutions. Together, they looked for a vendor that could meet RelateCare’s needs without overselling them on unwanted extras or tiered licenses.
Lantana recommended a hybrid solution: 8x8 Work combined with physical Polycom phones deployed to the homes of each remote consultant. First of all, this solution could connect seamlessly to the client’s system while maintaining the healthcare industry’s strict HIPAA security standards. Secondly, it would provide a consistent communications experience for both contact center agents and nurses who would be using the same software and hardware. Lastly, it was simple and cost-effective.
“We didn’t need any additional bells and whistles,” says Reinhardt. “All we needed was audio. 8x8 even helped us take care of the physical phone deployment, so one hundred percent of our capital expense spend turned into an operational expense, which is always welcome in any IT budget.” Crucially, the cost of a scalable, cloud-based solution was dramatically lower than investing in new VPN hardware, especially for a growing company like RelateCare.
