Vonage Business Communications Enables Rapidly Growing Publishing Organization

A Centralized Platform for a Rapidly Growing Organization

Based in Pittsford, New York, GateHouse Media is one of the largest publishers of local-market print and digital media in the U.S. The 10,000-plus-employee company reaches more than 23 million people weekly via its 145 daily newspapers, 340 community publications, and 570-plus websites in 37 states. The organization’s Center for News & Design provides creative services for GateHouse Media’s publications, while its UpCurve division offers marketing services to SMBs.

Background

With GateHouse Media’s acquisition of hundreds of community publications and local-market websites throughout the U.S. came its inheritance of a hodgepodge of outdated technology and business communications systems. The company’s vision was to empower its acquisitions to engage with their markets in the digital channels today’s customers and subscribers most prefer, offer its circulation department, sales team, and field reporters the latest productivity, efficiency, and mobility tools, integrate voice into its cloud-based applications, and leverage rich analytics to ensure the open call queues that would facilitate subscriptions and renewals. However, the multiple, disparate, on-premises phone systems across the organization made achieving this vision unfeasible.

To provide a modern, centralized business communications platform to all of GateHouse Media’s publications and spare its IT team from the burden of managing a wide variety of technologies, the publisher needed much more than a vendor who could deliver a unified, cloud-based solution. It needed an experienced collaborator who was prepared to address the concerns and satisfy the expectations—both before and during the deployment—of stakeholders throughout the organization.

GateHouse Media chose Vonage for its flexible, enterprise-grade unified communications as a service (UCaaS) platform, productivity-enhancing integration suite, award-winning SD-WAN product, and extensive expertise in deploying thousands of seats for large, far-flung enterprises.

The solution enabled GateHouse Media to offer its properties a comprehensive, revenue-driving publishing ecosystem that fully supports the company’s marketing, sales, customer service, and content creation initiatives, integrates voice interactions, productivity-optimization software, analytics, and business communications tools into its key cloud-based workflows, and ensures the prioritization of voice traffic while maximizing uptime reliability.

Results

Giving Customers and Staff the Technology They Demand

The Vonage Enterprise UCaaS platform replaces—with a single, centralized, easy-to-manage solution—the hodgepodge of GateHouse Media’s 300-plus acquisitions’ disparate legacy phone systems. The solution offers innovative APIs to prepare the publisher to engage with its subscribers on the channels they most prefer (e.g., SMS, social media, etc.), supports productivity tools like Click to Call for the company’s circulation department and mobility tools like softphones, call recording, and call transcription for the organization’s sales team and field reporters, and leverages revenue-driving analytics to ensure open call queues for subscriptions and renewals, generate reports on the effectiveness of classified ads, and more.

Consolidating Applications and Analytics in a Single Pane of Glass

By integrating voice into GateHouse Media’s G Suite, Salesforce, and SugarCRM applications, the Vonage Integration Suite allows the publisher to take advantage of efficiency tools (e.g., screen pops and call notes embedded directly within those applications), streamline its workflows, and derive more utility and value from its digital technology investments than ever before. The solution drives user adoption by providing a consolidated management console, simplifies how call information gets logged and tracked, and even supports Prodoscore, a productivity-optimization application whose machinelearning technology helps the company gain valuable insights into the success of its top sales performers and replicate their behaviors across the greater sales team.

Accelerating the Journey to the Cloud

Vonage’s SD-WAN solution, SmartWAN, alleviates any bandwidth issues created by the hodgepodge of GateHouse Media’s acquisitions’ legacy infrastructures—and expedites their migrations to the cloud—by prioritizing voice traffic, elevating quality of service, enabling real-time stateful failover capability (i.e., in the event of a carrier’s disconnection, all calls are diverted to a secondary carrier—in real time—to ensure the publisher enjoys exceptional levels of uptime), and more.