Florida Crystals

Early commitment to Microsoft Teams

In September of 2018, Florida Crystals’ management made the decision to move to Microsoft Teams for its unified communications solution. The company chose Microsoft Teams for both its reliability and usability, seeing it as the tool that would help boost productivity across its employee base.

Florida Crystals selected us as their partner to manage the implementation of Microsoft Team across the organization. We were chosen from an array of vendors because of our strong partnership with Microsoft and our simple solution for Microsoft Teams calling.

Working with Florida Crystals, we were able to successfully execute the following initiatives:

• Implementation of Microsoft Teams to all Florida Crystals users
• Delivery of adoption and change management services focused on driving successful adoption of Microsoft Teams to stakeholders across the organization
• Implementation of NTT Calling Plans for Microsoft Teams for 3,000 users across more than 30 sites in the United States, United Kingdom, Portugal, Mexico and Canada

Using Microsoft Teams results in improved collaboration and reduced cost of ownership

Since the launch of the effortless collaboration initiative, the Florida Crystals IT team has received considerable feedback from users indicating that Microsoft Teams has improved their work effectiveness. The meeting and calling capabilities within Microsoft Teams have contributed to employees’ ability to better listen to one another rather than simply talking over each other. There is now real enthusiasm to interact with video and content, whereas prior to the adoption of Microsoft Teams, employees were hesitant to interact on video.

One of the key components of the effortless collaboration initiative was the implementation of Microsoft Teams Calling, which they found to be the most technical daunting component of the project. Florida Crystals relied on our consultants to manage the technical implementation and NTT Calling Plans to provide services. Ultimately this became one of the most rewarding components of the project, resulting in the removal of desk phones and bringing all communications together into a single pane of glass.

Microsoft Teams has also helped Florida Crystals further achieve their goals related to sustainability. Florida Crystals discovered that, like many geographically dispersed companies, they had a large carbon footprint due to business travel. Since the solution went live, they have reduced business travel by more than 50%.

Most importantly, the company has realized a great benefit to their bottom line by implementing Microsoft Teams with NTT. Prior to the implementation, Florida Crystals purchased multiple, disparate communications and collaboration components such as PSTN calling, audio conferencing and video conferencing. They have since realized an estimated savings of 30-40% simply through the elimination of multiple standalone tools with their comprehensive Microsoft Teams solution.