One of my favorite things to do when heading into the office in the morning is blast "Bollywood" music in my car! It gets me energized for the day and ready to take on whatever hurdles are in the way to drive results. In that way, I can relate to any small business owner who similarly thinks about his or her "got to do's" the moment they wake up. Like an SME, I truly care about my business - which coincidentally IS the small and medium business market. At Avaya we are thinking big about the possibilities with this fantastic market segment. Worldwide, the small and medium segment is 99 percent of all businesses - so the impact they have on our global economy can't be overestimated. In fact, according to a recent report from Inuit, 60 to 80 percent of all new jobs will come from this segment. They need to be more nimble than their larger counterparts and clearly need to collaborate from anywhere on the road to ensure speed of decisions and responsiveness.
One of our IP Office 7.0 customers, The Agency Group, literally needs to keep its mobile staff rocking and rolling all day long. The Agency Group is a business that started small (its founder began booking rock and roll acts for high school events in the UK back in the '60s when he was just 16-years-old), but with big ideas and a lot of hard work has made the company flourish to become one of the world's leading talent agencies. Today, The Agency Group has over 160 employees based out of five offices in London, Los Angeles, Toronto, New York and Malmo, Sweden, and with clients all around the world. It's hard to think of a business that relies more on the power of communications than The Agency Group does. Their agents are on the phone constantly, all hours of the day and night connecting with their roster of over 1,500 artists. They need to be productive and efficient - to be accessible from wherever they happen to be working from (often behind the stage during performances) - and it all needs to play in tune and on key!
Today with IP Office 7.0, they keep the music playing with single number access (calls to their office phones ring simultaneously on any other designated phone), softphone, and two built-in 64-party conferencing bridges. (By the way, IP Office 7.0 also saved them a significant amount of money by enabling them to re-use their existing Nortel phone sets in their Toronto office.)
As Howie Gold, Director of IT for The Agency Group, noted, "When you factor in all the individual savings, it could be $20,000, $40,000, $50,000 per year, and that doesn't even account for the intangibles, the level of communication it raises between the staff... This ability to reach people in other offices sends productivity through the roof." Beyond productivity and significant cost savings, a key to the Agency Group's success is the high level of customer service they provide that helps drive loyalty. "We have to stay connected - with our clients, with the artists we represent - and that's where IP Office really comes into play."
We're very proud of what we were able to help The Agency Group achieve, and intend to keep the drum beat for SME stronger and louder than ever. Looking back, so far in 2011, Avaya delivered a large scale push of our presence in SME with the global "Think Big" event. The event is an example of how Avaya wants to foster a community of small businesses and inspire them by sharing best practices and experiences and how technology helped them on their path to success. In addition to The Agency Group, we featured a number of SME customers at the event. AmeriMerchant, for example, helps other small businesses grow through innovative financing programs. IP Office helps this small business (they have 80 employees in two U.S. offices) very efficiently handle huge volumes of sales calls every day. The result? More deals and more sales for AmeriMerchant - even in this tough economy.
Perhaps the SME star of the show, though, was Buddy Valastro, owner of Carlo's Bake Shop in Hoboken, NJ and star of three television shows. Buddy spoke about his "think big" approach to business, how it has helped turn his neighborhood bakery into a worldwide brand, and how communications plays a vital role for him. He also baked us an incredible cake that not only tasted great, it was an actual working IP Office system, complete with video conferencing! Check out this amazing cake on a recent episode of Buddy's "Cake Boss" show. (You can download it on iTunes.) Want to hear more from Buddy? Watch our "Think Big" online webinar for an in-depth interview with him.
Are you a small business owner or an IT Director of a medium size business? Do you need your staff to rock and roll like Agency Group? If so, I'd like to hear about your think big approach to growing your business. How would you like to see communications enable your employees to help you deliver on those big ideas? Let us know!
Posted 27 Jul 2011 at 12:18 PM
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