How IT leader OneSupport ensures business continuity, and scaled during crisis, with Twilio

OneSupport is a leading provider of customer service, technical support, and sales enablement solutions for technology products and services; a one-stop-shop for IT management needs. Whether it’s threat mitigation, password protection, device set-up, or any other IT need a business or individual might have, they’re on hand to offer one-on-one support, 24/7.

When one of their customers needed to quickly expand its phone system to support heavy voice traffic and future growth, OneSupport realized its legacy phone provider simply couldn’t handle it. They needed a solution that would allow them to move fast, and have the flexibility to scale as needed.

As a company already ahead of its time, having developed a fully web based automatic call distribution (ACD) in 1999 and was able to see a unified front end from the web by 2005. OneSupport knew it needed a partner that could support its forward-thinking approach and continued growth, a partner in the cloud. Twilio turned out to be the perfect fit.

A cloud-based solution that could integrate

With more than 20 years’ experience in the contact center space, the OneSupport team had, over the years, built deep integrations, bridging applications, and custom solutions for its customers using phone systems that eventually just couldn’t handle modern demands.

They knew they needed a solution based in the cloud, and one that could work with their existing relationships with legacy carriers. They also needed to support a growing workforce that was shifting more and more, over the years, to remote work. Fifty percent of the company’s workforce, for example, was working from home in 2008; that number hit 90 percent by 2013.

Ray Perez, vice president of IT, and Ryan Lommel, vice president of sales and service delivery, said Twilio’s SIP Trunking solution for telephony was the right fit for their custom cloud-based contact center.

“One of the things that made us jump to SIP Trunking with Twilio was a client sending us traffic from TDM [time-division multiplexing, a way of transmitting and receiving signals over a common signal path by means of synchronized switches],” Lommel said. “And TDM is fine, but it just doesn’t scale nearly as quickly, and then the lead times to be able to scale up basically untenable.”

Perez agreed.

“Twilio was just a really good fit. A lot of times we’re trying to wrangle, ‘How do we get this functionality out of here, and how do we build bridges into this technology?’ And Twilio was kind of the opposite. It was like, ‘Here. Here are all the APIs.’ I have yet to work with a legacy carrier where I can just pretty much sign-on, and then have a number within the first 15 minutes [like with Twilio].”

Swiftly responding to COVID-19

As OneSupport contact center solution was built for the cloud using Twilio’s Elastic SIP Trunking for transport, they were flexible enough to move all their workforce to remote work from home when the COVID-19 crisis happened.

The team has effortlessly scaled to meet demand and accommodate a fully-remote workforce, and is operating a fully-featured operation that includes recruiting, training, and managing the operation itself across the entire country, remotely.

While this has helped them continue high-level client support, it has also increased employee satisfaction and reduced churn, Perez said: “And the fact is, in a comparable contact center job where you’re having to go in and fight traffic, and sit in the center from nine to five, it’s a lot different production environment than it is being able to work from home.”

Perez added that for him, Twilio is about speed, scale, and the simple-but-critical ability to handle the sheer volume of calls.

“When you’re dealing with trunking and carriers and things like that, you’re talking in days, weeks, right? With Twilio, you’re talking minutes.”

Lommel agreed.

“The real turning point there for me that’s driven a ton of value is that we’re able to easily take care of the stuff that has become table stakes. Can you queue a thousand calls? Yes.”