Florida Crystals enables effortless collaboration with Microsoft Teams

Together with Florida Crystals we helped them improve employee collaboration and connect disparate communication tools. They chose us to assist them with transforming their tools to a comprehensive, unified communication solution using Microsoft Teams with Calling. Following a successful implementation as well as adoption and change management services, users report improved productivity and engagement, and management is delighted by significant reductions in several expense categories.

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Focused on delivering effortless collaboration

Florida Crystals utilized an array of communications and collaboration tools, but productivity suffered because they lacked a comprehensive, modern collaboration solution. Chief Information Officer Kevin Grayling made it his priority to implement a unified communication solution to achieve the goal of ‘effortless collaboration’, unifying how people communicated, shared information, met and made telephone calls.

Core to the vision of effortless collaboration is that collaboration should be easy. Florida Crystals set the expectation that joining a meeting from home, the office or a conference room should be a ‘one-click experience’ and that end-users should be able to seamlessly transition from chat, to email, to meetings and calling. Florida Crystals’ leadership focused on identifying a technology vendor and partner who could deliver on this vision.

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Which services?

Direct Routing as a Service, Adoption and Change Management Solution Architecture  

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Which technologies?

Microsoft Teams, NTT Calling Plans  

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Which partners?

Microsoft 

‘The magic of the launch of Microsoft Teams with Calling at Florida Crystals is that we are spending 30-40% less, with exponentially more capability.’
Kevin Grayling , Chief Information Officer, Florida Crystals 

Early commitment to Microsoft Teams

In September of 2018, Florida Crystals’ management made the decision to move to Microsoft Teams for its unified communications solution. The company chose Microsoft Teams for both its reliability and usability, seeing it as the tool that would help boost productivity across its employee base.

Florida Crystals selected us as their partner to manage the implementation of Microsoft Team across the organization. We were chosen from an array of vendors because of our strong partnership with Microsoft and our simple solution for Microsoft Teams calling.

Working with Florida Crystals, we were able to successfully execute the following initiatives:

  • Implementation of Microsoft Teams to all Florida Crystals users
  • Delivery of adoption and change management services focused on driving successful adoption of Microsoft Teams to stakeholders across the organization
  • Implementation of NTT Calling Plans for Microsoft Teams for 3,000 users across more than 30 sites in the United States, United Kingdom, Portugal, Mexico and Canada

Using Microsoft Teams results in improved collaboration and reduced cost of ownership

Since the launch of the effortless collaboration initiative, the Florida Crystals IT team has received considerable feedback from users indicating that Microsoft Teams has improved their work effectiveness. The meeting and calling capabilities within Microsoft Teams have contributed to employees’ ability to better listen to one another rather than simply talking over each other. There is now real enthusiasm to interact with video and content, whereas prior to the adoption of Microsoft Teams, employees were hesitant to interact on video.

One of the key components of the effortless collaboration initiative was the implementation of Microsoft Teams Calling, which they found to be the most technical daunting component of the project. Florida Crystals relied on our consultants to manage the technical implementation and NTT Calling Plans to provide services. Ultimately this became one of the most rewarding components of the project, resulting in the removal of desk phones and bringing all communications together into a single pane of glass.

Microsoft Teams has also helped Florida Crystals further achieve their goals related to sustainability. Florida Crystals discovered that, like many geographically dispersed companies, they had a large carbon footprint due to business travel. Since the solution went live, they have reduced business travel by more than 50%.

Most importantly, the company has realized a great benefit to their bottom line by implementing Microsoft Teams with NTT. Prior to the implementation, Florida Crystals purchased multiple, disparate communications and collaboration components such as PSTN calling, audio conferencing and video conferencing. They have since realized an estimated savings of 30-40% simply through the elimination of multiple standalone tools with their comprehensive Microsoft Teams solution.

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