Nurturing growth: ALCIVIA saves time and cuts costs by consolidating with Zoom Phone

As an agricultural co-op with more than 35 locations in Wisconsin, Illinois, Minnesota, and Iowa, ALCIVIA always has growth top of mind. They know customer innovation and employee connection are the seeds of a fruitful business, both of which depend on reliable communication.

Don Schlising, chief information and communications officer at ALCIVIA, is in charge of creating reliable, distributed communication across the company, including its rural locations. And while that used to involve traditional hardwired phones, a recent merger opened his eyes to cloud-based telephony — and Zoom. 

Embracing a cloud-first mindset

“With our merger, we had two legacy organizations that had different communication systems across the board, and so that really drove an opportunity for us to pull it all together,” Don said. “It was about finding ways to make things cleaner and collaborate better as an organization. We didn’t have a great way to stay in touch with others because we had all these disparate systems.” 

While Don recognized there was a need for consolidation, he initially felt hesitant about moving to the cloud. “I initially wanted to go on-prem because I’m old school when it comes to telephony — I’m used to SIP trunks, PRIs [primary rate interfaces], and physical connections. I was worried that rolling out internet-based phones may not be as reliable.” 

Don’s fears were quickly put to rest after testing Zoom. “We landed on Zoom Phone, and it’s been fantastic ever since. When customers call, their experience is not impacted by higher-latency connections. Zoom Phone is one of those services that just works; it’s been the best decision for the organization,” he said.

Savings without sacrificing scalability

Even though Don opened his mind to cloud-based phones, he still had to make his organization’s architecture open to it — which meant porting over hundreds of old on-prem numbers. So he tapped Zoom’s Professional Services team for some support.

“We had to close 500 to 800 DIDs [direct inward dialing] from over a dozen providers that had to be ported over, and that [Zoom Professional Services] team helped us get it to where we need it to be,” he said. “Working with Zoom gave me a certain comfort level — the collaboration was fantastic all the way through.” 

That support, coupled with Zoom Phone’s simplified management, opened up more possibilities for Don and his team.

More concrete savings emerged, too. “The elimination of our physical phone lines and our SIP trunks almost paid for what we pay for Zoom today,” he said. “By eliminating the phone systems, the associated maintenance, and the time and labor, Zoom [Phone] costs us less than what we had for all those other things but comes with a lot more features. It’s kind of a no-brainer — you [get] ROI out of the box,” Don added.

Those savings meant the ALCIVA team didn’t have to factor in more spend when facing growth. “When we had our old on-prem solutions, I always had to ask:  ‘Do I need another server?’ [or] ‘How do I license it?’ Now, I don’t have to worry about all of those pieces — I can just easily scale.”

Consolidated communications 

While Zoom Phone was helping ALCIVIA handle more than 130,000 calls a month, Don still wanted to bring in other tools that could help his team diversify how they communicate with customers. “We were looking for any solutions that give us more than a phone — [the ability to] chat with our customers and members online or use video for more personal interactions, or if someone wants to show something. We just want to streamline and give people more avenues [to reach us],” he said.  

So, Don embraced solutions across Zoom’s product portfolio to support his organization’s collaboration needs. In addition to our cloud-based phone system and video meetings, the agriculture organization also uses: 

Zoom Team Chat 

“Zoom Team Chat has streamlined communications and helps you get quick answers. You need to share something? Send it right in the [Zoom app]. I can fire up a video call right there, or make a phone call to a customer,” Don said.

“We’ve also created [chat] groups where we can collaborate with each other, especially since we have teams that are spread out. It’s nice for communication across the entire organization, but also that focused team communication — it just pulls everybody together with quick messaging.”

Zoom Rooms 

“We have about a dozen Zoom Rooms. We mounted and integrated TVs and cameras so people can easily go into [conference] rooms and fire up conversations with vendors and internal stakeholders.”

Zoom Webinars 

“We use Zoom Webinars for a ‘Women in Ag’ webinar series that we run. It enables connectivity for different speakers, who can join from a variety of locations.” 

One platform for everything

As he plots out future initiatives, accessible and flexible communication remains Don’s North Star. That starts with employee mobility, which he’s hoping to support with the implementation of Zoom’s Bring Your Own Carrier (BYOC) program. 

The same goes for the customer experience, as Don is hoping to use Zoom to bring simplicity and flexibility to ALCIVIA’s customer base. “We want to open up options to our customers, too. That’s why we’re looking at Zoom Contact Center. We want to meet our members’ and customers’ needs as they evolve, and that includes online chat, call routing based on the team’s support skills and particular services, screen and file sharing, video chat, and potentially a self-service option in the future.”

No matter what’s next, Don is confident that his organization will be able to handle any changes. “Everybody understands how to use Zoom, there’s no question. We don’t need instructions, and the adoption just goes quickly because everybody’s already using it. And if people are willing to use [Zoom], it keeps those teams together,” Don said.