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Barb Grothe of Telecom Resources, an independent consulting firm, discusses a new customer deployment that uses Microsoft Lync Voice and Plantronics headsets – with no deskphones. She explains how satisfied the users are, and the value they receive from being hands free and mobile, regardless of their age and expectations.
Blair Pleasant: Hi, this is Blair Pleasant and I'm with Barb Grothe of Telecom Resources. Barb is an independent consultant.
Barb, you had some interesting news that you were telling me about this morning. Can you explain what's going on with your new project?
Barb Grothe: Yes, Blair. We just completed an engagement that was 500 users. The application, we went out for a bid and looked for a PBX. The CIO is very aggressive. She’s very visionary and she mentioned to me that she would like to do this deployment without any telephones on the desk. I'm thinking, “you might be a little ahead of your time right now, but we can try it.” I do believe desk phones are going to be dinosaurs soon...all the mobility applications.
The deployment happened in September of this year, 2012, and (had) 475 users. Every one of them have a Plantronics Voyager Probe Bluetooth. There are no desk phones on any of the desks.
The CIO kind of dictated this to the users and said, “if you do not like this after one week, we will give you the desk phone.” After the week there were no complaints. Everyone loves doing it on the headsets to be hands free. They like being able to walk 30 feet from their desk and just hit the button to answer a call. If they’re at their desk they just use their mouse and answer when it pops up on the toast. So far, everything's good and the CIO's happy. The deployment went great. The employees love it.
Blair: Were there any complaints from the users? Even different ages?
Barb: No. It was all generational. We have very young employees up to the 60-somethings. And even the 60-somethings, they didn't complain and they were the ones that I was most worried about.
One of the instances that we did have come up was the fact that when they first come in, in the morning if they have to make a quick call, they have to log into their client and get all that set up, turn on their laptop, put their headset on and then they can make the call.
The other incident that came up were conference calls. They wanted to be able to have a – either a puck or a device that has the speakerphone that you plug into the USB port. We did deploy some of those in areas that are conference-call heavy that they need other people in the room to listen in on the call in their own offices. Those people got the USB speakerphones.
Those were really the only two complaints that we had. We fixed both of those by giving them that USB port.
Blair: And the solution is based on Microsoft Lync?
Barb: Yes. Microsoft Lync was the deployment across the 500 stations. It is a relatively small company but so far, we have taken them from a 20-year-old TDM system to bringing them into the future. It's been pretty exciting.
Blair: Congratulations. It's great news. Thanks for sharing it with us.
Barb: Okay. Thanks, Blair.