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Riverbed Helps Boost Customer Service for Federal Health

By Anil Sharma
TMCnet Contributor

Riverbed Technology, the IT performance company, has deployed Riverbed (News - Alert) Steelhead appliances at Federal Heath Sign Company offices across the United States and in Federal Heath's data center located in Willow Brook, Ill.

With the deployment of Riverbed WAN optimization, Federal Heath has been able to increase bandwidth capacity by 3x and reduced data traffic by as much as 98 percent during peak periods, resulting in increased application performance over the WAN.

Officials with Riverbed said that with WAN optimization, Federal Heath has improved employee productivity and collaboration, leading to faster customer service.

'We selected Riverbed Steelhead appliances for their ability to increase the performance of our centralized systems. We now receive unsolicited feedback from employees on how effective the system is in providing faster customer service - a huge improvement from the complaints we were receiving previously,' said Greg Katsaros, IT manager at Federal Heath, in a statement.

"In addition, Steelhead appliances are easy to deploy into the network and we don't have to constantly spend time administering them. We now have a happy IT staff, productive employees and satisfied customers,' said Katsaros.

Federal Heath provides electric signage, canopy and fascia products, commercial remodeling, nationwide conversions and maintenance services.

The company has 450 employees in four manufacturing facilities and over 20 sales and maintenance offices throughout the U.S.

The company was looking for a company-wide system that allowed employees to retrieve accurate customer information quickly, including survey photos, design and engineering drawings, email correspondence, site contracts and legal documents.

Federal Heath along the way also launched its 'Lean Concept' initiative, which encouraged departments to eliminate waste and unnecessary steps.

Officials with Federal Heath said that to support the corporate initiative and create a more collaborative environment between its dispersed offices, the three-person IT staff developed a proprietary customer status system (CSS (News - Alert)), a project management system that allows salespeople, project managers, designers and estimators, manufacturing plants and customers to exchange information internally over the corporate network or externally over the Web.

Orders range from custom signage and corporate IDs to signs for Bed, Bath and Beyond, Chevron (News - Alert), Chili's, CNN, Countrywide, Harrahs, Volvo and Target.

Katsaros said that prior to the development of the CSS, the customer service had been impacted by the company's inability to quickly access the most accurate information on each client and the resulting difficulty in finding historical information.

'This made our employees have to perform extra work to recreate design specs and notes that already existed,' he said.

The Federal Heath IT team decided to deploy WAN optimization technology and selected Riverbed for its ease-of-deployment and simplicity, leading to the deployment of Steelhead appliances.

Company officials said that with Riverbed WAN optimization, Federal Heath increased its bandwidth capacity by 3x and reduced data traffic by as much as 98 percent during peak periods.

The implementation of WAN optimization helped the company continue to build on its 'Lean Concept' initiative to eliminate waste and unnecessary steps.