Turning obsolescence into opportunity: Carso’s challenge of building a unified infrastructure
The situation had become especially difficult to manage for a company with 25 French subsidiaries, 3,000 employees and thousands of business customers.
“We were facing major challenges: some subsidiaries were experiencing monthly phone outages due to the copper network being phased out or because of obsolete equipment,” confirms Guillaume Boivineau, Information Systems Director for Carso Group.
As for the modern features that users and customers now expect, they were almost non-existent: no interactive voice response system and no call queue management. And if Carso’s teams needed to update a simple greeting message, they had to go through an integrator. Hard to imagine in the age of digital telephony.
In addition, the wide variety of tools used across the different subsidiaries did little to support collaboration. “From the IT department’s perspective, each subsidiary had its own environment, which created complexity for my teams and meant we had no consolidated view. There was no call monitoring at all, either in terms of quality or volume,” adds the CIO.
Objectives
Workplace Together demonstrates the transformative power of a modern collaborative telephony solution in users’ day-to-day work.
With Workplace Together, a whole new world of telephony and collaboration is now possible
Carso Group’s CIO did not take long to choose the Workplace Together [Webex] solution. A visit to the Orange Business showroom was enough to convince him of its strengths. It also gave him the opportunity to see the breadth of the Orange Business partner ecosystem and select the best option.
"The very hands-on demonstration of the solution and Cisco equipment reassured us about the maturity of the solution,” says Guillaume Boivineau.
But what exactly made Workplace Together so appealing to Carso?
First, Carso’s CIO appreciated the reliability of the solution, which immediately inspired confidence.
“From a technical standpoint, Cisco’s Workplace Together [Webex], combined with Orange Business, provides a centralized, resilient and secure solution,” he notes.
By choosing Workplace Together, Carso did not need to install additional equipment at each site, unlike with other solutions. “That would have gone against the centralization we were looking for and the simplification of our environment,” adds Guillaume Boivineau.
In detail, Workplace Together [Webex] is an application-based solution designed to meet the demands of hybrid work. It brings together several features on a single platform, structured around four modules:
- Business telephony: a cloud-based module delivering global operator-grade voice quality. It includes advanced features such as IVR and call queues, team messaging, and a native connector for Microsoft Teams.
- AI-powered interactive video conferencing: secure meetings for up to 100,000 participants, with AI features such as automatic framing and noise reduction.
- Customer relationship management: a multichannel platform with CRM connectors (including Salesforce and others), offering automated outbound calling campaigns and optimization tools for performance analysis.
- Video conferencing hardware: a full range of Cisco devices centrally managed through the single Control Hub interface.
To deploy its new collaborative telephony solution, Carso was supported by a dedicated Orange Business project manager. This close human support helped build lasting trust. The chosen scope was a pilot covering six subsidiaries, 10 sites and 120 users. And the approach? A rapid migration from the old solution to the new one, almost seamless for users.
“At each site, operations were completed in four to six hours, with only a very short service interruption of 30 to 60 minutes during the lunch break,” recalls the CIO.
Enough to delight users, who now benefit from a highly intuitive application that has been easily adopted. A few training sessions are nonetheless planned as part of the Orange Business training program included with the Workplace Together solution.
Day-to-day work has been completely transformed since the adoption of the new collaborative telephony solution
Key figures
25
subsidiaries
3,000
employees
10
sites use the Workplace Together collaborative telephony solution
120
users quickly got to grips with their new tool
4 to 6 hours
to migrate from the old solution to the new one
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Carso
Carso is an independent French group and a leading player in environmental, food, pharmaceutical, forensic and building analysis, helping to manage risk and protect public health.