Non-Profit/Government Case Study

The Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments (COG) trusted Fusion Connect to cut their costs significantly with a robust cloud communications solution.

Robust Cloud Solutions

“The network expertise displayed by Fusion Connect’s Project Team played a huge role in our decision. We were really impressed.”

—George Danilovics, IT & Facilities Director

Download the COG Network Case Study

The Challenge

Stuck with a full-featured PBX that was too expensive to manage, COG soon realized that their communication costs were rising; leading them to quickly look for a replacement. Fortunately, they were able to cut their costs significantly with cloud communications from Fusion Connect.

The members of the COG include local elected officials as well as members of the state legislatures, the U.S. Senate, and the U.S. House of Representatives from the Washington metropolitan area. They’ve helped to tackle the region’s biggest challenges – restoring the Potomac River, ensuring the Metro system was fully built, and strengthening emergency preparedness after September 11, 2001.

But, in 2014 they had a special challenge: replace their full-featured Nortel PBX with a cloud-based solution while keeping the same phone features and keeping costs in line. COG was on a shared Nortel PBX with other partners in its building. The decision was made in 2013 that the shared Nortel PBX would be retired in 2015.

George Danilovics, Director of Information Technology & Facilities Management noted, “We operate a very lean overhead budget and needed to find a telephony solution that would work without adding staff or costs.”

The Solution

COG chose Fusion Connect with different seats based on usage. Fusion Connect Call/Contact Center was implemented as a call center used for call distribution and queuing. The Call Center allowed their eight (8) agents the flexibility to work efficiently from anywhere – office or home.

Fusion Connect’s smartphone application, unified communications, allowed their mobile users to make and receive calls using their business identity over their existing cellular service. “With (cloud), we got the features that we needed for a fraction of the price,” said George.

The transition from a full functioning PBX to a cloud-based solution proved quite a challenge. Several enhancements had to be made to the network which included a complete network upgrade to replace switches and routers that were end of life.

Image of people mhaivng a conference call

“We felt more comfortable with the engineers at Fusion Connect in terms of explaining any concerns with the network and how we would connect to it,” said George. “The network expertise displayed by Fusion Connect’s Project Team played a huge role in our decision. We were really impressed.”

Fusion Connect’s cloud-based voice services allowed COG to cut monthly recurring costs (MRC) by 12% and they were able to lower their conferencing costs by 30% with Fusion Connect’s conferencing bridge service.

The solution allowed them plenty of room to grow as the company expands – without breaking the bank. “We were able to keep costs in line with expectations,” said George. “We’re happy that we were able to spend less of our budget on telephony and more on products, services and the objectives of the organization.”

Industry
Non-Proft
Government

Products & Services
Contact/Call Center Hosted Voice (VoIP)
Unified Communications

Website
www.mwcog.org

Who is COG?

Comprised of 300 elected officials from 22 local governments, Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments (COG) is an independent, non-profit association that brings area leaders together to address major regional issues in DC, MD, and VA.