VGM Group, Inc. Gets its Distributed Teams Collaborating Easily with Glip®

Company profile

This e-commerce software company could no longer support its growing staff with an on-premises phone system.

This e-commerce software company could no longer support its growing staff with an on-premises phone system.

Company profile

Company profile:

Founded in 1986 as a buying group for independent providers of home medical equipment, VGM Group has grown into a national leader in several industries, including healthcare, insurance, golf, and restaurants. Today the company’s 25 business units serve 25,000 businesses across the US and Canada. The 100% employee-owned VGM has also been named one of the top large companies to work for in Iowa.

Year founded:

1986

EMPLOYEES:

900+

HEADQUARTERS:

Waterloo, IA

WEBSITE:

vgmgroup.com

The many business units that comprise VGM Group collectively serve tens of thousands of companies throughout the US and Canada—businesses in industries as wide ranging as home medical equipment, physical therapy, insurance, restaurants, golf, and in-home care. Just a partial list of the services VGM offers includes group purchasing, online education, fulfillment services, business insurance, marketing services, and even lobbying.

Successfully managing all of these services for 25,000 customers requires seamless team communication and collaboration among the company’s nearly 1,000 employees. So, after upgrading its communication infrastructure from a legacy PBX system to the cloud with RingCentral, the employee-owned VGM Group decided next to upgrade its team collaboration platform.

Finding an all-inclusive platform for team collaboration

“We have hundreds of employees spread across several buildings on our sprawling main campus, plus hundreds more at our other locations,” says Bryan Tonne, VGM Group’s Director of Business Technology. “We wanted a platform that would make it easy for our teams to work together if they were in different buildings or different parts of the country.”

“At first the company rolled out a different enterprise platform for team messaging,” Tonne explains. “It was okay as far as it went, but we were really just using it for online chats, and that wasn’t nearly the level of collaboration the company was looking for.”

Then VGM Group realized they could deploy a robust and feature-rich team collaboration platform that was part of the same RingCentral family as the other products from RingCentral that they were already using for VoIP calling, video meetings, and other communication services. That team collaboration platform is Glip.

“Glip is really improving how our teams communicate and get their work done.”

Bryan Tonne

Director of Business Technology

“Now that they’ve started to use Glip, our employees can be much more productive and responsive than they could using email, and we won’t need to keep buying servers.”

Bryan Tonne

Director of Business Technology

Connecting departments, reducing email clutter, and enhancing productivity with Glip

Soon after they started rolling out the Glip team messaging and collaboration app to some the company’s teams, VGM Group began seeing significant benefits in at least three key areas.

“First, because Glip is part of RingCentral, it’s letting us build the all-inclusive communications and collaboration infrastructure we were hoping for,” says Tonne. “Now we have one online platform to manage voice, web meetings, fax, our contact center, and even team collaboration. Everything works together seamlessly, and that’s helping connect our different departments and business units and letting us collaborate more effectively.”

A second benefit, which might be the most important for VGM Group, is that Glip is far more than the enterprise instant messaging platform they were using before. It’s a unified online workspace for team messaging, project and task management, file sharing and commenting, calendar event tracking, and more. In other words, it’s the robust collaboration app VGM Group was looking for.

“Glip is really improving how our teams communicate and get their work done,” Tonne says. “We can create an online meeting room for each project, and everyone working on that project can go in there, add their notes, files, pictures… and collaborate anytime.”

Finally, a third benefit VGM Group is already seeing with its Glip rollout, Tonne explains, is a reduction of email, which is saving both time and money. “At just one of our companies, HOMELINK, we have 400 employees, and they’ve always primarily used email—hundreds of messages every day for just about every employee. It’s not efficient, and it’s forced us to buy plenty of email servers. Now that they’ve started to use Glip, our employees can be much more productive and responsive than they could using email, and we won’t need to keep buying servers.”

Deploying Glip company-wide

VGM Group has been so pleased with their early experiences collaborating with Glip that the company is now moving all of their employees, in all of VGM’s locations, away from their instant messaging app and onto the Glip platform. “We’re really looking forward to the whole company being on Glip,” Tonne says.