INDUSTRY: LAW
Becker and Poliakoff
How a Broadsmart/BroadSoft-powered solution transformed communications for a leading law firm
Becker & Poliakoff is a commercial law firm with thirteen offices across Florida and a presence in New York, New Jersey, Virginia, Washington, D.C., and the Czech Republic. The company’s 170 attorneys and supporting professionals serve a diverse client base worldwide.
The Challenge
As with all law firms, voice communication is a critical business application for Becker and Poliakoff. To address their needs, the firm had developed a telephony infrastructure of standalone PBXs at each of its locations. However, with a limited IT staff, the systems were inconsistently updated, supported and maintained, and with no redundancy for disaster recovery. In fact, an outage in a line connecting a PBX to the public network left one of the company’s offices without phone service for days.
Complicating the challenge, more than a third of Becker and Poliakoff’s work is performed off-site at client offices and other remote locations. The firm lacked a way for team members to interact seamlessly with office communications and maintain peak productivity while on the go. There was no easy way for mobile and remote workers to receive voicemail notifications, access contacts, initiate conferences, or receive calls made to their office phones.
When Ken Schultz was brought on as Becker and Poliakoff’s new CIO/CTO, he was convinced there was a better way. He had helped his previous employer move to a cloud-based communications solution and thought Becker and Poliakoff could benefit from a similar approach.
The Solution
Schultz worked with experts from Broadsmart, a BroadSoft service provider partner, to develop a business case for cloud-based unified communications (UC). An analysis showed that, for the same financial commitment required to maintain its current systems, the firm could move to a BroadSoft BroadWorks hosted UC platform – achieving much-needed operational redundancy and expanding the communications features available to its team.
Broadsmart engineers worked with Schultz to create a discreet Broadsmart-managed MPLS network for voice traffic, with the firm’s existing data network as backup. Based on his previous experience, Schultz felt strongly about separating voice and data. “Seemingly simple changes made by network engineers on the data side can have unexpected consequences on voice traffic,” he said. “Separating the two networks reduces the likelihood of an outage caused by human error.”
Becker and Poliakoff also adopted BroadSoft auto attendant and call center capabilities, as well as BroadSoft UC-One®, a comprehensive unified communication solution. UC-One provides a powerful suite of productivity applications to simplify and enhance team communication, including mobile and desktop integrated voice and video conferencing, desktop sharing, presence information, instant messaging, unified messaging, and contact center.
Broadsmart integrated other BroadSoft-compatible technologies to help the firm fully leverage its communication investment. A speech assistant application lets team members dial colleagues by spoken name, while voice-to-text transcription enables voicemail messages to be received as emails. Also, a Web-based receptionist console frees up the firm’s receptionists to perform other duties.
Solution Components
- BroadSoft BroadWorks hosted UC platform
- BroadSoft UC-One® Unified Communication solution
- BroadSoft Call Center
- BroadSoft Auto Attendant
- BroadSoft-compatible Mobiso Speech Assistant
- Genband Voicemail Transcription
- Polycom HD IP handsets
- Broadsmart network connectivity, engineering, and support
The Impact
Adopting a cloud-based unified communication solution delivers significant new benefits to the Becker and Poliakoff team.
Business continuity / resiliency in the event of a failure. The firm now has a redundant failover path in the event of an outage. Calls can be transparently handed over from one network node to another on the voice network – or to the firm’s companion data network if required.
- Improved productivity for mobile workers. With BroadSoft’s UC-One client, team members have a consistent user experience whether accessing UC services from a desk phone, laptop, smartphone, or tablet. They can communicate when, where, and how they want – making them more productive than ever.
- Improved scalability. The hosted architecture easily scales to support new team members by simply adding software licenses. Phones and other communication devices are “plug and play.”
- Expanded support, 24-7. Previously, a single IT staff member and consultant supported the firm’s communication systems. “We had to keep our fingers crossed that nothing happened while either of them were on vacation or away from the office,” Schultz said. With hosted services delivered by Broadsmart, Becker and Poliakoff now has a team of experts providing 24-7 monitoring and support, allowing potential issues to be resolved before they escalate. The firm also benefits from a single point of accountability for both data and voice services.
- Increased efficiency. Firm-wide gains have been realized quickly by introducing new platform features, such as inter-office extension dialing between remote locations, hoteling/hot-desking, and unified call accounting and billing to support the finance team.
About BroadSoft:
BroadSoft is the leading provider of software and services that enable mobile, fixed-line and cable service providers to offer unified communications over their Internet Protocol networks. The Company’s core communications platform enables the delivery of a range of enterprise and consumer calling, messaging and collaboration communication services, including private branch exchanges, video calling, text messaging and converged mobile and fixed-line services. For additional information, visit www.BroadSoft.com.
About Broadsmart:
Broadsmart is a telecom service provider with a managed business class offering of SIP/IP trunking, cloud unified communications, and data solutions. The Broadsmart network core is purpose-built for latency sensitive, real-time voice/video communication with customer options for integrating private MPLS access. Broadsmart maintains multiple geographically redundant network operations centers (NOCs), providing the ultimate in service diversity and resiliency. Since its founding in 2000, Broadsmart has focused on providing innovative, cost effective, customer-driven services to business customers worldwide, ranging from high profile Fortune 500 companies to one-site privately held small businesses. The company’s ‘go to market’ approach continually refines product lines, provides high value, high quality and increased efficiencies so that Cloud Services can continue to evolve. These scalable offerings are always backed by unparalleled support to ensure sustenance to meet, and exceed expectations. For more information, please visit www.broadsmart.com or contact Broadsmart at (954) 449-8000 sales@broadsmart.com.
