Background
With a desire to standardize its global telephony and contact center infrastructure around a single platform, Berry Global adopted Microsoft Teams and AudioCodes Live complete calling and contact center solution. With the dedicated assistance of AudioCodes professional services team, the migration was successfully completed resulting in improved productivity, enhanced customer experience (CX) and reduced communications costs.
Berry Global Inc is a Fortune 500 global manufacturer of innovative plastic packaging and engineered products created to serve customers of all sizes around the world. Berry is headquartered in Evansville, IN, and operates over 250 locations worldwide with more than 46,000 employees.
For more information, visit the Berry Global website.
Objectives
Berry Global decided to undertake a major re-design of its communications infrastructure. A key motivator was the desire to reduce overall costs by consolidating and standardizing its communications platforms and carrier connections across all its global offices.
As a global enterprise, Berry relies on effective and reliable communication between its sites and with its customers and partners. However, due to a series of mergers and acquisitions over the years, its previous communications setup included a variety of disparate legacy PBX systems that were costly, complex and difficult to manage. To successfully modernize its communications infrastructure the company decided to migrate to Microsoft Teams unified communications (UC), which offered a unified platform for collaboration, messaging, voice, and video.
The team at Berry understood that the key to a successful migration was to collaborate with a trusted partner experienced in all aspects of the discovery, planning and execution phases of such a large-scale project. The partner would be responsible for:
- Global voice infrastructure planning and design
- Full core infrastructure and global site deployment
- Offering a fully managed service for five years
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Migrate to Microsoft Teams from a multi-site, legacy telecommunications environment made up of disparate PBXs
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Improve CX with a state-of-the-art Teams integrated contact center
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Reduce overall costs for equipment, maintenance and support services
"As a contact center engineer with over 15 years of experience with several platforms, I can confidently say that I’ve never encountered a company quite like AudioCodes. They actively listen to their customers and swiftly adapt to meet their requirements. If you’re utilizing Microsoft Direct Routing today and have the need for an omnichannel CX solution, do yourself a favor and consider AudioCodes Live and Voca CIC.”
Seamless, Rapid, and Cost-Effective Migration to Microsoft Teams
Berry selected AudioCodes as its partner to guide it through the complex process of migrating to Microsoft Teams. By adopting AudioCodes Live complete calling and contact center solution for Teams on a monthly subscription basis, Berry was able to deploy all required elements of the end-to-end solution along with expert planning and implementation services in a highly cost-effective and standardized manner across its offices worldwide.
AudioCodes provided a dedicated project team, including a project manager, technical staff, and support organization. AudioCodes also provided guidance on service provider selection, implementing and configuring hardware and overseeing the project implementation. Commenting on the partnership and tight collaboration with AudioCodes, Michael Rapp, IT Director at Berry Global, said, “I look at AudioCodes as a partner of Berry Global, an extension of our team. They have been there at every step of the way and provided us with all we needed.”
The overall solution designed and implemented by AudioCodes included a number of critical elements:
Voice Infrastructure and Connectivity
The first step in Berry’s Teams Phone implementation was to ensure seamless voice connectivity with the PSTN. To achieve this, Berry adopted AudioCodes’ certified Direct Routing session border controllers (SBC) in a high availability configuration to offer scalable, reliable and resilient inbound and outbound calling services. Using AudioCodes SBCs enabled Berry to consolidate its PSTN interfaces to simplify management of the company’s voice network and reduce communication costs.
Thanks to AudioCodes SBCs and MediaPack analog gateways, Berry could facilitate coexistence between its legacy PBXs and critical analog devices and the Teams environment, thus helping to ensure a smooth and gradual migration at the company’s own pace.
Contact Center
A reliable and flexible contact center solution is essential for any successful multinational company to ensure customer satisfaction. Berry Global is no exception in this regard. Having experienced issues with its previous vendor, Berry was keen to find a reliable and flexible replacement.
Fortunately, AudioCodes was able to help in the shape of the award winning Voca Conversational Interaction Center (CIC). Voca CIC is an AI-first, omnichannel, Microsoft-certified contact center that streamlines agent and customer experience thanks to its Azure-native integration with Teams. Berry successfully implemented Voca for both its customer-facing contact center and also for internal departments, such as IT, accounts and inside sales.
Meeting Room Devices
One of the most compelling aspects of Microsoft Teams is its support for high-quality video conferencing, bringing teams together from all over the world. This is critical for a company like Berry with a truly global workforce. With many meetings carried out in hybrid mode with some participants in the office and others joining remotely, it is crucial that all participants can enjoy full collaboration, to hear and be heard, to see and be seen throughout the session.
To ensure high-quality hybrid meetings for all its employees, Berry adopted AudioCodes cost-effective, certified Microsoft Teams Room (MTR) solutions. AudioCodes provided Berry with a wide range of MTR devices to meet the needs of meeting rooms of all sizes and provide an excellent user experience for all participants, wherever they may be located.
IP Phones
Standardization was one of Berry’s key objectives for its global Team migration. Using AudioCodes Microsoft-certified IP phones, the company was able to adopt a standard solution across all its sites globally, offering all users a common user interface and physical device. This helps reduce training costs and simplifies support efforts.
Management Tools
A large global voice network like Berry’s requires efficient management and constant monitoring to ensure its employees, business partners and customers can enjoy reliable and high-quality voice services. AudioCodes One Voice Operations Center (OVOC) offers Berry a single pane of glass approach for managing and monitoring its entire voice network from a central location. OVOC allows Berry’s IT teams to promptly identify potential network and voice quality issues so that they can be rapidly mediated and resolved before they become service affecting.
For its global deployment of MTRs and IP phones, Berry uses AudioCodes Device Manager to commission, configure and monitor devices in any location. Through its easy-to-use UI, Device Manager allows Berry’s IT team to monitor device activity, troubleshoot performance issues and perform bulk activities, such as software upgrades, remotely.
Results
The close partnership with AudioCodes was a key factor in assisting Berry Global to achieve a seamless, rapid, and cost-effective migration to Microsoft Teams. As Michael Rapp stated, “Partnering with AudioCodes has been very successful. AudioCodes was the only partner out there that offered a true integration with Microsoft Teams.”
Berry now benefits from the simplicity of AudioCodes’ comprehensive Live for Microsoft Teams offering, coupled with the effective project leadership skills and unmatched technical knowledge of AudioCodes’ in-house experts. The result is a reliable Microsoft Teams UC voice and contact center experience that continuously delivers seamless global communications, high productivity, and an unmatched user and agent experience.
“As a contact center engineer with over 15 years of experience with several platforms, I can confidently say that I’ve never encountered a company quite like AudioCodes,” said Robert Kuper, Telecommunications Engineer at Berry. “They actively listen to their customers and swiftly adapt to meet their requirements. If you’re utilizing Microsoft Direct Routing today and have the need for an omnichannel CX solution, do yourself a favor and consider AudioCodes Live and Voca CIC.”
