‘The Office Comes to Us’: UDG Healthcare Unifies Communications With Zoom

As a global healthcare advisory, communications, commercial, clinical and packaging group, UDG Healthcare relies on high-quality video communications to serve partners, clients, patients, employees, and shareholders across two operating divisions and numerous subsidiaries. But due to the acquisitive nature of the organisation, UDG Healthcare’s family of companies wasn’t always on the same page when it came to telephony, which meant the IT department juggled multiple phone systems, aging hardware, and expensive contracts.

UDG Healthcare turned to Zoom to consolidate its voice and video solutions and enable employees to conduct critical conversations with healthcare professionals, colleagues, and some of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world.

The need for a more flexible phone solution

UDG Healthcare adopted Zoom Meetings several years ago to replace a handful of video conferencing platforms, including Skype and WebEx. Zoom quickly became the default corporate video solution, beating out the company’s incumbent collaboration tool on quality, screen sharing, and other key features.

“We use Zoom across all our divisions and we love it,” said Jeremy Heaven, group IT service delivery manager at UDG Healthcare. “We use [Microsoft] Teams for what it’s designed for, collaboration, storing documents, and team chats, but not as a company-wide video conferencing tool. We have been very impressed with the quality of Zoom video and screen sharing.”

Telephony was a different challenge altogether. Every UDG Healthcare subsidiary had its own fixed-line phone system, and managing multiple contracts and costs placed a burden on the team. When UDG Healthcare sent employees home to work remotely during the pandemic, desk phones sat collecting dust for months.

UDG Healthcare’s work on an upcoming client project meant sales reps needed a more flexible softphone option with robust business phone features. The organisation knew it was time to re-evaluate its phone solution to give employees the technology they needed to work effectively.

‘Zoom came to us with solutions’

“The Zoom Phone team did a presentation that really impressed us. Zoom came to us with solutions, and that’s what continues to make our partnership so successful,” Heaven said.

Even during a pandemic, switching to Zoom Phone was an easy decision and an even easier process. UDG Healthcare purchased 2,000-plus phone licenses and rolled out a larger implementation across back offices and group employees in the U.S., U.K., and Europe.

“We can’t go into the office, but here’s a way that the office comes to us,” Heaven said. “The porting itself was very simple — it was seamless. Everyone at Zoom was helpful and extremely knowledgeable.”

An enterprise-wide communications solution

Zoom’s unified communications solution made it easy to adapt to a more flexible and fluid remote work environment. “When employees get a call on their direct line it rings on their laptop, mobile, and iPad,” Heaven said. “I can take a call from my desk, place it on hold, pick it up on mobile, go to a Zoom Room, and elevate it to a meeting.”

UDG Healthcare’s use of Zoom Webinars for internal and external communications has also grown.

“For larger meetings, the webinar functionality gives us more control — and our Ashfield Meetings & Events subdivision has the ability to facilitate conferences for clients with 9,000 people on Zoom,” Heaven explained.

UDG Healthcare has longer-term plans to roll out Zoom Phone across its family of companies. “Our next step is giving everyone a Zoom Phone extension for internal calling, and Zoom Phone licenses to those who need to make external calls. Zoom’s platform will become our default directory,” Heaven said.

“When it comes to anything where we need professional-quality audio and video, we use Zoom. The stability of service, the actual product — it is fantastic,” Heaven said. “When the world went into lockdown, the ability to do everything on Zoom was crucial to our success.”