Windy City Fieldhouse

The Challenge

Bob Beaubien is the Executive Vice President and co-founder of Windy City Fieldhouse, the Midwest's largest team-building and entertainment company, providing fun and interactive programming for companies in Chicago and beyond. Bob's been with the company since its inception. But unfortunately, so had the phone system.

While Nortel was a satisfactory solution initially, it had begun to decay with time, leaving them vulnerable to a legacy system failure. "We'd done everything we needed to do – connect fiber lines to it, update the hardware, all the things required to make the system manageable," Bob recounts, "But when it came down to it, the system was just...outdated. Some of the hardware wasn't even replaceable. We needed to jumpstart to the right level of technology, or else we'd be in big trouble."

The Solution

With the help of a telecommunications partner, Bob and his team began reviewing their options. And one solution rose to the top every time – S-NET. According to Bob, what differentiated S-NET's UCaaS solution over others was their price point, bandwidth flexibility, and the number of glowing recommendations from other experts in the industry.

"I was hesitant at first that there would be a lot of finger-pointing with S-NET. But an industry partner assured me that S-NET takes responsibility for their offerings, addresses issues themselves, and handles the technology well overall. That recommendation, plus everything else, got us over the edge."

So WCF made the switch from their antiquated Nortel system to S-NET's UCaaS offering, which included S-NET's cloud phone system and broadband fiber services they could scale up or down depending on their month-to-month – and even day-to-day – needs. S-NET also helped WCF upgrade from POTS lines to PRI and ensured their new communications software was up to date with current industry standards.

The Result

After partnering with S-NET, Bob and his team at WCF enjoyed a far more modern solution with capabilities they could only dream about before. Sales reps had click-to-call functionality from their CRM. Voicemails were translated to written records and sent to the appropriate person via email. In short, S-NET brought WCF's communications into the 21st century.

Not only that, but when COVID hit, WCF was also able to seamlessly pivot from hosting in-person events to hosting virtual ones. Their phone systems could travel as they traveled, and their bandwidth usage could be increased or decreased depending on what was needed that month. "S-NET managed that as quickly as possible," Bob remembers, "And once things got back to a more normal pace, they let us go back to our regular usage rates, which we greatly appreciated."