Posted by Mike Hincks, Director of IT Infrastructure at Vivint Solar
Editor's note: Today we hear from Mike Hincks, Director of IT Infrastructure at Vivint Solar, a leading provider of residential solar power in North America. The fast-moving enterprise is using Google Apps, along with Dialpad, to drive collaboration and support for a workforce that's 63% remote. Register here to join our YouTube Live event on September 15 at 10 a.m. to learn more about how Dialpad, a Recommended for Google Apps Technology Partner, can modernize your IT strategy to support the anywhere worker.
Vivint Solar’s mission is to flip the switch on how the world consumes power. With millions of homeowners adopting solar for economic and environmental benefits, our workforce has rapidly grown to nearly 4,000 employees spread across 51 offices.
Much of that growth has been within our mobile workforce. Today, about 63% of our employees work remotely. Our sales professionals and technicians are constantly on the road building relationships with customers, and they need the right technology to ensure that they’re able to get their jobs done as efficiently as possible.
We turned to Dialpad to eliminate the hurdles of traditional voice technology, which can include multiple steps to reach successful deployment and ongoing maintenance challenges.
Integrating communications and productivity in the cloud with easy access to Gmail, Calendar and Docs across every device
Dialpad’s pure-cloud communications solution directly ties voice, video and messaging with
Google Apps. Our mobile workforce immediately saw increased productivity once we made the switch. To get started, employees downloaded the Dialpad app, which automatically synced their meetings, emails and shared documents from
Gmail,
Calendar and
Drive. The fact that it works across laptops, tablets and mobile devices (not just a desk phone) frees our workforce to work where and when they want.
Dialpad’s native integration with Google Apps allowed us to connect two mission-critical tools, and now our mobile workers can get their jobs done faster and more efficiently. When employees log in with their Google credentials to view recent emails, shared documents and upcoming calendar events, they get insights and rich context right from the Dialpad app.
In addition, Dialpad syncs with Google’s global company directory, so employee contact information is always up-to-date. And if an employee needs to call a colleague or customer, they can click-to-call with Dialpad straight from Gmail.
A simple deployment of scalable, high-value technology, without the overhead
Our transition to a pure-cloud communications platform with Dialpad and Google has resulted in significant cost savings and impactful productivity gains. For example, our prior telephony system needed a team of five people to manage and administer it full-time. Now, one employee spends only 5% of their time managing our new system.
Traditional IT voice systems come with hundreds of thousands of dollars in yearly infrastructure and hosting costs, while modern competitors require significant professional services just to get the product up and running. Dialpad, by contrast, had no upfront capital expenditures or ongoing maintenance costs. When switching to Dialpad, we were able to get our communications network deployed in just a couple of days without the high upfront costs — and Google Apps integrated instantly.
As our business continues to grow, both tools will scale seamlessly and neither requires the purchase of new IT infrastructure.
An empowered workforce that collaborates freely
A pure cloud stack lets employees get work done from anywhere. At Vivint Solar, our customer success managers need to connect with technicians in the field, but are based in our office headquarters. Before Dialpad and Google, it was a significant challenge for these different groups to maintain close relationships or communicate at a suitable time. Now, managers can resolve issues or bridge conversations using group messaging or SMS.
By integrating our core communications and productivity tools in the cloud, Vivint Solar has enabled an agile and deeply connected workforce that can collaborate from anywhere. It has created a new kind of business dialogue. Whether employees are local or remote, Dialpad and Google Apps make it easy to bridge voice with productivity and build a connected, more efficient workforce.
