World Fuel Services Saves Over 50%, Instills New Ways of Working with the Zoom Platform

Working to reconcile a complex technology stack, regular network outages, and manual and paper-based processes, Miami-based World Fuel Services (WFS) struggled to quickly deliver agile solutions to its global customer base. 

Tasked with optimizing energy, logistics, and related services for customers around the globe, the Fortune 500 company needed to innovate at the pace of a startup, as well as enable a connected and productive staff — spawning the adoption of flexible collaboration solutions like Zoom Phone, Zoom Rooms, Zoom Meetings, and Zoom Webinars.

We talked with Jeff Smith, COO of World Fuel Services, who shared how the organization strategically leverages the Zoom platform to support its unique services.

Disparate solutions across a global workforce

After undergoing multiple mergers, WFS grappled with a collection of disparate solutions that IT struggled to support. To complicate things further, WFS’s global workforce — 5,000 employees across 200 sites — needed a consistent user experience to support high-touch communications across offices. 

WFS also needed a phone solution that could: 

• Provide reliable communications in low-bandwidth areas
• Easily integrate with existing hardware and software solutions
• Reduce costs
• Mitigate management challenges for IT 

As they examined providers who could help address these needs, the WFS team had unique criteria. “We had a principle for our partners: work with people we aspire to be like, and Zoom was at the heart of that,” Smith said. “By working with great companies, we’ll get better at a faster rate.”

Costs savings and new capabilities with Zoom Phone

When WFS replaced its traditional PBX system with Zoom Phone, adoption spread like wildfire.  

“There are now 1,971 total users of Zoom Phone with an additional 750 being provisioned in 2021, over 2,400 numbers, and 144,000 calls per month across 30 different countries. This allowed us to decommission 78 office legacy PBX systems,” Smith said.

As Zoom’s first global Zoom Phone customer in Brazil and one of the broadest in terms of global reach, WFS found scale and savings with the cloud-based phone solution. “The use of Zoom Phone has seen carrier costs halve. It allowed us to streamline the provisioning process from months to days, reduced our operating cost to manage and support, and helped us avoid the need to expand our support and engineering team while continuing to scale,” Smith said. 

WFS has gotten innovative with its use of Zoom Phone, initially augmenting it with Amazon Connect and using the call routing feature to create full contact center capability. Now, the organization has deployed the Zoom Phone Power Pack to evolve this contact center functionality, executing a “frictionless” global rollout, according to Smith. He added, “Change management is hard, but the number of issues was minimal. Rolling [Power Pack] out was inherently easy.”

Using Zoom Rooms & Meetings to instill better ways of working

To expedite the pace of operations and standardize the user experience across locations, WFS also implemented Zoom Meetings and Zoom Rooms. Employees took quickly to the new avenue for collaboration, as Smith said, “the usage of Zoom has gone viral with almost no staff training — now there are about 47,000 Zoom Meetings in World Fuel Services every month.”

User experience also led WFS to rapidly adopt Zoom Rooms, with an initial five Zoom Rooms licenses expanding quickly to over 125 due to an influx of customer requests. Using Zoom Rooms to modernize the conference room experience, WFS was able to elevate inter-office workspaces and even create a technology “genius bar” via virtual rooms. “We were also one of the first to implement multi-partition Zoom Rooms that convert one large room into combinations of five with divisible wall partitions using the native Zoom experience,” Smith added.

A future defined by flexibility

As WFS — like so many companies — explores what it takes to build an agile, hybrid workforce, they’re letting flexibility guide the way. “Originally we planned to have employees come in part-time, but they are being just as productive and our velocity and throughput metrics have actually increased, so we’re letting teams decide when they need to get together.” And Zoom is powering that flexibility, with video and voice at the heart of WFS’s collaboration strategy. “We had this vision of creating a frictionless environment — whether someone’s at a coffee shop, their home, or in the office,” he added.

By letting employee experience inform its decision-making, WFS offers nimble service delivery while still future-proofing operations for any changes still ahead. The end result? Effective workers and happy customers.