‘Zoom Really Expanded Our Ability to Meet Online’: How Traction on Demand Enables Frictionless Communications During COVID-19

As one of North America’s largest dedicated Salesforce consulting and application development firms, Traction of Demand (ToD) provides organizations with the guidance, applications, and expertise they need to get the most out of Salesforce’s powerful CRM platform. ToD not only implements the Salesforce platform but also strategically guides customers on how to leverage their investment to achieve their organizational objectives. The organization also offers application development services, developing stand-alone SaaS and cross-platform solutions to help organizations gain insights into their day-to-day business. 

With a people-centric approach to those operations, ToD’s mission is to empower people and their organizations to build their own success through the development and growth of the Salesforce ecosystem.

Implementing an enterprise-level communications solution

ToD has relied on video communications since its inception to create tight-knit global teams and communicate with its teams in the U.S., Canada, India, and Australia. As a growing organization, ToD required an enterprise-level communications solution that was scale-ready and could support a frictionless virtual meeting experience for all its employees.

“Traction on Demand has been a video-first company since the beginning,” said Kevin Wood, ToD’s Director of IT. “Our prior video solution was starting to fail to meet our requirements with the growth ToD was facing, and we knew we needed something a little more robust and easier for Tractionites to use.”

ToD also supports a modern and dynamic IT environment in its offices, where employees can receive real-time support for their devices and systems and get back to work faster. However, when COVID-19 relegated all of ToD’s employees to working remotely, the organization had to find a way to continue providing that same degree of support to a distributed workforce. 

“As director of IT, it was a real challenge to figure out how to provide IT support to over 800 employees when they all started working from home,” Wood said. “We had a very large office with IT ‘walk-up’ stations where employees could bring their laptops directly to an IT professional and get the help they need in real-time. And they really loved it. How were we going to transition that environment now that everyone is working from home?’”  

Streamlining operations with Zoom

“We tried everything – GoToMeeting, WebEx, BlueJeans,” said Chris Peacock, ToD’s Chief Marketing Officer. “We started seeing Zoom everywhere. It was becoming the norm for technology companies to use Zoom, and they are typically the early adopters for great products. Our customers and partners would also roll their eyes when we asked them to join anything other than a Zoom Meeting, so it got our attention.” 

ToD was confident in its decision to implement Zoom Meetings based on the platform’s ease of use, dynamic feature set, and ability to readily integrate with Salesforce. 

“We’ve used Office 365 and G-Suite products, so we got plenty of offers from those providers to add on their video conferencing solution as part of a ‘bundle’,” Wood said. “But at ToD, we always use tools that are best-of-breed, not just the ones that come bundled with other products. Zoom integrates well with Salesforce, which was obviously big for us, and Zoom offers a seamless set of features that is easy to use and allows people to do their jobs.” 

The teams at ToD also decided to implement Zoom Phone and Zoom Webinars based on their positive experience with Zoom, creating an arsenal of solutions that could meet all of the organization’s communications needs in a single application. 

“We’ve been using Zoom Phone on our mobile phones to interact with a lot of our customers because not every customer wants to interact over video,” Peacock said. 

“We also set up a call queue for our salespeople using Zoom Phone so calls are automatically distributed to our sales teams, which allows them to work from anywhere,” Wood added. “We’re also using Zoom Webinars for our town halls and quarterly meetings with the company because we can interact with everyone through Q&A and give them direct access to the leadership team.”

Wood and his teams were also able to recreate the IT “walk-up” stations available in ToD’s offices using Zoom, which enabled them to provide the same frictionless IT support to ToD’s employees in a virtual space. 

“I created a perpetual Zoom Room that is always open so people could drop in with their IT questions or issues,” Wood said. “We always have a few members of the IT team in there to provide real-time support through Zoom to our coworkers. It also creates a space for my IT team to interact and for me to pop in and catch up with them.” 

Working the ‘new normal’ 

By implementing Zoom, ToD created a communications infrastructure that enables frictionless and effective communication across video, phone, and webinar while also providing a platform for IT support during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

As ToD expands and grows, Zoom will continue to serve as a critical platform for streamlining employee operations, communicating internally, and interacting with ToD’s customers. 

“We were huge fans of video before we adopted Zoom, but Zoom has really expanded our ability to meet online,” Wood said. “Zoom has accelerated our ability to meet the challenge of working in the ‘new normal’.”