Everyone Works at Home at Chorus, Part One

The Infrastructure and Equipment to Support Telecommuting

Marvin Luz had serious concerns about Chorus becoming a virtual company. The vice president of client services thought the transition was going to be a lot of work, and he wondered how the company would get through it.

"I was a little apprehensive," says Luz. "There's something to be said for being in an office and the security blanket of having your coworkers right next to you if you have questions."

Foremost on the client services exec's mind was Chorus's ability to meet its customers' needs with a staff of telecommuters. The company had to figure out how customer support calls would be routed to agents at their homes and in such a way that clients wouldn't know that the agent to whom they were speaking was working from home.

Chorus already had in place much of the telecommunications infrastructure it would need to support telecommuters, including a firewall and VPN. In 2007, CIO Boyd deployed a voice over IP (VoIP) solution from Cisco that included Cisco's IP Communicator and a high-end router in the company's New Jersey data center, which remains in operation, with staff visiting as needed. He also added a Windows Active Directory server (Chorus already had two in its office outside Houston) and two T1 lines to the New Jersey data center. Boyd says all of this technology made it easier for Chorus to go virtual. (For more on the technologies necessary to communicate telecommuters see, "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Telecommuting.")

In preparation for the company's transformation, Boyd and his seven-person staff deployed the IP Communicators on every employee's laptop. Employees use the IP Communicators to make and receive phone calls.

The IT department ran into trouble when it first began deploying the IP Communicators on everyone's laptops. Because it was new technology for the company, Boyd and his staff weren't sure how to set it up at first. They were also just coming up to speed on the voice over IP system. Boyd says the first few deployments of the IP Communicators were very difficult, but once he and his staff got more comfortable with the technology, it went more smoothly. (They had help from Dynamic Strategies, a New Jersey-based VoIP services provider.) It took Chorus about three weeks to get all the IP Communicators on everyone's computers, he says.

To ensure the quality of the phone connections, Boyd and his staff had to give some employees higher-end routers than typical home routers that dedicate a certain amount of bandwidth to employees' Internet phones, says Boyd.

Most employees already had cell phones, but Chorus put together a policy and expense guidelines for all employees so that they could get BlackBerrys or Windows Mobile-compatible devices to use as a back up in the event their IP Communicator goes down. (Chorus also supports the new 3G iPhone.)

In addition, Boyd and team created "hunt" groups for each of the support groups: customer support, infrastructure support, application development and business analysts. So if customer support needs an infrastructure employee to help with a major client issue, the customer support employee dials the extension for the infrastructure team's hunt group and that number rings out to the entire group and whoever is available can answer the call.