Palm Springs Nonprofit Social Services Agency Turns to Broadvoice for Reliable Mobility

Jewish Family Service of the Desert (JFS Desert) is a non-sectarian nonprofit agency that provides social services to the Coachella Valley community in Palm Springs, California. Founded in 1982, the agency provides mental health counseling services on a sliding scale for those without insurance and will never turn someone away because of their inability to pay. JFS Desert provides emergency financial assistance for low-income households and community programming for home-bound seniors and local Holocaust survivors. JFS Desert is guided by a mission to provide for the social service needs of the Jewish and general community of the greater Coachella Valley with a commitment to promoting the well-being of people of all ages, incomes, and lifestyles. Every year JFS Desert provides services to approximately 3,000 clients.

JFS Desert’s leadership was exploring the benefits of remote work well before the pandemic made it mandatory for many. The flexibility of remote work would enable the agency to serve clients more effectively, but the agency lacked the proper tools to support remote work and enable employees to maintain professional, confidential communications.JFS Desert, a loyal Broadvoice SIP Trunking customer since 2017, began researching hosted voice over IP (VoIP) phone system options in 2019. In early 2020, the onset of the pandemic forced the company to step up its search to meet the urgent need for a reliable communications and collaboration solution to support remote work for its 22 employees. As the Director of IT and Operations at JFS Desert, Alex Aguilar was intent on finding a cloud based phone system that provided the following functionalities:• Portability. When the pandemic forced the agency to close offices for in-person services, their clients needed more support than ever. Because of this, the agency wanted a communications solution that could provide 24/7 mobility for every staff member.• Manageability. As a small nonprofit, the agency needed a phone system that would require a small amount of Aguilar’s time and be easy for employees to use and access.• Continuity. Aguilar wanted to ensure that callers could reach staff directly while displaying the agency’s number on the caller ID rather than employees’ personal numbers.• Reliability. The agency needed a system with dependable uptime compared to the frequent outages they experienced with their legacy, on-premise PBX system.• Confidentiality. Because of the sensitive nature of many client interactions, the solution needed to be HIPAA-compliant to protect clients’ personally identifiable information (PII).

Aguilar’s search for the right solution led him to the Broadvoice b-hive platform. Broadvoice b-hive is a unified communications as a service (UCaaS) platform designed for small and mid-market businesses like JFS Desert. It combines enterprise-class cloud PBX, unified communications (UC), and virtual call center features in an all-in-one integrated platform.The cloud based solution would enable employees to work from home — or any other location — using their office phone numbers and extensions. Employees can also connect and collaborate with clients in ways that were not possible with the agency’s existing PBX system.“What really made Broadvoice stand out was their willingness to work with us to customize our solution,” said Aguilar. “Our agency has specific communication and collaboration needs, and Broadvoice walked us through the best way to address each of them.”