Cutting back on toggle tax: Penn Community Bank fosters productivity through seamless experiences

Toggle tax (noun)

1. The time and cost wasted by switching between apps to get work done. 

Andrew Duckworth is one of its biggest opponents. Andrew, IT operations specialist at Penn Community Bank, realized his organization was wasting resources — time and screen real estate — jumping between disparate solutions, sapping productivity as a result. So, he began solving the issue with a new phone management solution from his current meetings provider, Zoom. Soon, Zoom Meetings, Zoom Phone, and Zoom Rooms became ubiquitous across Penn Community Bank’s workspaces.

Call center operations get an upgrade

“Almost two years ago, we looked for new solutions for our phone management. Our contract was coming to an end with our current provider, and we wanted something more robust,” Andrew said. 

Andrew decided he should test a few options to find the best fit for all his employees, but especially his call center. “Out of all the ones that we tested, Zoom had the most customer-friendly experience. The admin portal is so easy to use compared to [other options], and the end user experience was excellent. We had our call center included in all of the testing that we did for the phone system, and when we moved them over to Zoom they had zero issues.”

We all got new Poly devices, and agents started using the Zoom application for calling … but the call center had no issues going from hard phones to also running on soft phones, which was amazing.” 

The Zoom Professional Services (PSO) team was involved in implementation, mostly to provide the expertise and helping hand that Andrew needed. When reflecting on his collaboration with the PSO team, Andrew noted, “That was excellent. I wanted to take the reins on it and basically have [PSO team member] as my backup. So, I built most of our system and had them double-check it … [the PSO team] kept me essentially in line, making sure I hit the important points. One thing that [they] drove home was the E-911 feature. The PSO team wanted to make sure that we had the location set up correctly and that we would have no issues with E-911.”

Andrew found that the hassle-free implementation of Zoom Phone made things a lot easier for everyone. “Being in the IT department, our focus is to keep everything running very smoothly for the ones who are talking to the customers — whether it’s behind the scenes or actively working on trouble tickets. Working with vendors such as Zoom makes our team members’ lives better and makes it easier to communicate with each other and our customers.”

Enabling resiliency through flexible solutions

While Penn Community Bank’s use of Zoom Meetings for customer interactions sparked the adoption of Zoom Phone, their experience with Zoom’s cloud-based phone solution led to a wider modernization project — both within their call center and branch offices.

With Zoom Phone, call center operations became more resilient and flexible. “One of the biggest things for our call center is that they can change call queues on the fly. Let’s say it’s a snow day and the bank decides to completely shut down. [Agents] could change that message as soon as we get that word, and that’s something that we didn’t have before,” said Andrew.

He added, “Just having the call queue and the Power Pack, [agents] are able to see their analytics in real time without using a cumbersome and confusing program. They love being able to see what people are doing at any given time, and the call center manager looks at the analytics of those calls and finds out where pain points may have been.” 

Andrew also integrated Zoom Rooms into bank branches to support Penn Community Bank’s hybrid work policy and modernize dated spaces. 

“We’re upgrading branches as we go; a lot of them are old. We’ve started updating branches by putting DTEN TV screens into larger offices and those can be reserved right now for lender meetings or just general meetings within the bank,” he noted. 

An added bonus: employees knew how to use the new technology right away. “No one’s asked us how to use [Zoom Rooms] yet, which is amazing. People have been able to just start using it.”

And this transformation is just the beginning for Penn Community Bank, as they’re looking to expand to Zoom Team Chat — which is currently being rolled out — and Workspace Reservation soon. 

As he plans the rollout for Zoom Team Chat, Andrew expects it’ll only help mitigate the toggle tax. “With Zoom Team Chat, you can jump straight from chatting with someone to going into an actual video meeting so that you can share your screens, jump into a phone call, or set up a quick conference call right then and there without having to send out emails. All these people are available right now? Let me send them all a quick chat. Now we’re jumping into a quick meeting because we have to discuss this project.”

Security and compliance were always must-haves

For Penn Community Bank, insufficient security and compliance controls are roadblocks — solutions only become part of infrastructure if they hit certain standards. Fortunately, Zoom’s data routing control feature for real-time meeting and webinar data in transit cleared the path toward adoption. “Our director of IT and compliance is very happy that [with Zoom] we can keep information in the U.S. and that we can select that right within the portal. I even gave her screenshots proving that during our proof of concept,” Andrew said. 

Andrew also strategically deploys ad-hoc call recording to address additional compliance and security requirements. “We use call recording for security means, and I really like that call recording and voicemails are so easy to download and store.”

The bank has also relied on Zoom Phone’s nomadic E-911 feature to support physical safety. “We actually had an incident about a month ago where there was a medical emergency and someone did call 911 from the branch, and everyone on the incident response and security teams were alerted,” Andrew said.

Fewer silos, more productivity 

For Andrew, eliminating the redundancies that come with disparate solutions is worth its weight in gold — the reduction in toggle tax has increased employee productivity and overall happiness. 

“Everything we are doing with Zoom we were doing previously, but with multiple apps. Having everything in one application makes life much more productive for all of our users, because at a single glance they can see if someone’s on a call or in a meeting or if they’re away,” he said. “We always had to bounce from application to application and browser to browser, and now everything just works — you go to one place. We’re happy and our users are happy.”

User happiness remains Andrew’s North Star. “We want to make things more streamlined and accessible for our end users,” he noted. And Zoom’s unified communications technology is a key partner in their journey toward that ideal state. “Zoom has helped us reach new levels of productivity in and out of the office. We never thought a single streamlined application like this would be possible.”