A pioneer in the VoIP industry for consumers, Vonage was founded in 2001 and has remained true to its roots as a technology disruptor, continuing to evolve and develop a portfolio of emerging technologies that, today, transform how people and businesses communicate. Through a series of strategic acquisitions, as well as organic growth, Vonage has pivoted to the business space, providing more than 100,000 businesses with the tools they need to improve internal connections and collaboration among employees while enhancing engagement externally with customers. Vonage's unique offering and powerful combination of unified communications, programmable communications, and cloud contact center solutions help customers to create better business outcomes.

As it sought to build solutions for businesses, the company focused on creating a unified communications solution in the cloud that integrates seamlessly into a business' existing cloud productivity applications. The result is that companies can increase staff productivity and offer their customers better experiences while reducing operational and infrastructure costs.

This particular offer is built by unifying Google Workspace, Salesforce, Prodoscore, and Vonage's own communication platform, Vonage Business Connect (VBC). It also supports the flexibility to add other cloud solutions, and it is already winning Vonage new business clients. As Vonage brought the solution to market, the company also deployed the solution across its internal organization to enable its own digital transformation.

The case for Prodoscore

As adoption of Google Workspace progressed, company executives wanted to help ensure employees were realizing the full value from the available cloud tools, including, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Google Meet, and Drive.

"We sensed that Google Workspace use could be accelerated but we needed to better visualize what tools teams were using to collaborate across the organization," explains Kevin Thomsen, National VP Strategic Partners at Vonage.

The underlying questions about software adoption were central to Vonage's decision to introduce Prodoscore – a powerful tool that helps businesses visualize and measure how teams are adopting cloud-based tools. Since Prodoscore is fully integrated with Google Workspace out of the box, managers can quickly gain visibility into employee activities such as how often they create and store documents in Drive, and how many emails they send through Gmail. Prodoscore enables businesses to set their own parameters for productivity and for measuring performance on a daily basis. The combination of Google Workspace, Salesforce, and VBC enabled Vonage to provide a unique cloud-based solution that integrates seamlessly with Prodoscore — all with very little deployment effort.

20 percent increase in productivity

Crisantos Hajibrahim, Chief Evangelist at Prodoscore, explained how Prodoscore became a core sales management tool at Vonage. "A group of sales managers at Vonage initially deployed Prodoscore across Google Workspace, Salesforce, and VBC as a pilot to visualize and analyze the data from all three cloud-based applications in a single dashboard," he explains. "This enabled them to establish a baseline of productivity. The managers then coached their sales reps on the value of Prodoscore and how it fostered engagement and productivity across the cloud applications. Team productivity jumped 20 percent because the sales team now had a clear view of the applications that drove productivity and where to focus their activity."

While Prodoscore measures productivity, Google Workspace provides the cloud foundation to kick start an organization's digital transformation. Beyond the initial surge in productivity, the Vonage team soon identified areas of opportunity to further drive team productivity. Prodoscore provided managers, for the first time ever, with insight that some team members were not taking full advantage of the cloud-based applications provided by the company.

Driving behavior change

With Prodoscore deployed, Vonage gained a management productivity tool to encourage behavior change across its employees. For example, Vonage configured the solution so that employee activity in Salesforce received a higher productivity weighting than other less productive tasks. As adoption of Salesforce activities and related email prospecting increased, the employee productivity score moved higher.

"Setting the Salesforce weightings higher was deliberate," says Crisantos. "Prior to Prodoscore, some sales reps recorded their opportunities in Salesforce once or twice a week. Sales managers want to use Salesforce as a real-time forecasting tool and, therefore, ad hoc input of activities resulted in inaccurate real-time sales data. With the stronger weighting on Salesforce, sales reps regularly and more consistently use Salesforce as part of their daily routine, thus providing cleaner and more real-time forecasting data for management to rely on."

After implementation of Prodoscore, the data indicates a nearly 200 percent increase in Salesforce updates by Vonage sales reps.

The Vonage team also looked to increase document collaboration across the sales team and considered Docs sharing and Google Meet as key indicators of collaboration. The sales managers leveraged Prodoscore activity weighting to encourage app adoption. The initial trial group of 15 veteran sales reps demonstrated an increase in activity post deployment of Prodoscore*.

VBC activity also increased across the team as engagement increased with Salesforce and Google Workspace. With the Mobile App, all calls made and received by field sales reps are automatically logged into Salesforce. Sales reps no longer have to manually log each call in Salesforce, since all the work is automatically done for them.

Learning from the best

As use of the fully integrated solution increases, Vonage has identified more opportunities to improve processes and productivity, particularly for its sales team. The company now aggregates all text from emails, Calendar, Google Chat, Docs, and Salesforce activity, and then Prodoscore uses Cloud Natural Language processing to analyze it.

"Each week, we task the sales reps with focusing on different products or parts of the offer. We now have visibility to see whether they are following the marketing messaging," adds Reggie. "While the first step is compliance, from there, the team can analyze the interaction data further. We can pinpoint the most successful reps, both in terms of their targets and their productivity score, and examine what they do differently. We can then use that to improve coaching and training."

The value of the solution is not just in the quality of the data but also the speed at which it is generated.

"Using Cloud Natural Language, we can understand what sales reps are saying, doing, and promoting much faster and more clearly than before," adds Reggie. "We see it as supporting our coaching efforts focused on helping people and teams perform better."

Selling an integrated solution

With Vonage reaping the rewards of the integrated solution, the next step was logical – offer it to customers.

"We're going to market and selling exactly what we're doing here at Vonage: a digital transformation toolkit, supported by VBC, Salesforce, Google Workspace, and Prodoscore," says Reggie.

Already, that message is proving compelling – though Vonage has an advantage: "It's a lot easier to train salespeople to sell to customers if they're selling the things they use daily," says Crisantos. "VBC, Google Workspace, Salesforce, and Prodoscore are tools they use everyday; they know the value proposition and can explain it. With that, we're reducing training costs and closing deals sooner."