CORPORATE PHONE SERVICES ON THE GO
Case Study Voice Over IP Services for Wellness Studio
Starting up a new business has a multitude of challenges for owners including developing a strategic plan, raising capital, finding space to operate the company, hiring excellent people, and getting your brand into the marketplace to attract clients. Jen Kraft and Melanie Struble, founders of Body Positive Works, an integrated wellness center (bodypositiveworks.com) have experienced this first-hand since starting their business in November 2016. From their beautiful studio in Saddle River, New Jersey, Jen and Melanie focused their passion for celebrating a positive body image and providing a total support system for clients to celebrate themselves using modalities s such as therapeutic yoga, meditation, psychotherapy, nutritional counseling, chiropractic, reiki, bodywork, massage, emotional freedom technique and psychotherapy under one umbrella.
One of their challenges was to provide voice services for a mobile workforce that would be at the center depending on client appointments, class schedules, and workshops. Practitioners should be able to place and receive calls for the Body Positive Works not only from the center but also when they are at home or other locations. Melanie and Jen’s vision for voice communications was that every practitioner has a smart phone, so let’s use that platform for integration with the voice system in the office. There will be still be phones in the office for frequent users like the administrator and business owners. However for everyone else, they would be assigned an extension and mailbox on the voice server that would map to a phone application on their smartphone. The smartphone application should work seamlessly, regardless of whether the user was on the Body Positive Works WIFI network, a practitioner’s home WIFI network, or on the cellular LTE data network.
TECH DETAILS
The original implementation for Body Positive Works (BPO) involved the Bria soft client application installed on a mobile phone connected running over a Virtual Private Network (VPN) application called Openvpn also running on the mobile phone. The user would first use the Openvpn application to securely connect to the Body Positive Works office network. The Bria client would then register to the voice server in the office network and be able to place and receive calls – for outgoing calls, the main BPO number would be used as the caller id, masking the user’s cell phone number, Incoming calls would ring the Bria client, allowing the user to distinguish between a BPO call and a personal cell phone call.
Louisa Voice has recently improved upon this solution by eliminating the need for a VPN client to talk to the enterprise voice server. Bria now accesses the voice server securely via a session border controller (SBC) gateway, which then proxies the incoming or outgoing call through the voice server. Eliminating the need of the VPN client simplifies the solution from a user and operation perspective. Body Positive Works will be using this enhanced solution shortly.