The Problem

With 24/7 telephone answering services and over 130 multilingual specialists, Memo covers everything from medical emergencies to alarm handling. Keeping services online, and providing customers with secure and robust call handling, are essential for their business. Any loss or drop in service can have severe consequences for their clients – potentially even loss of life.  

Prior to their migration to Microsoft Azure, Memo’s entire business was hosted on terminal servers in a central office, which were fast-becoming a hindrance to their scalability, capacity and stability. System admin tasks were increasingly time-consuming and prohibitively repetitive, and very few permanent optimizations were executed. And, as the company grew and increased its locations, patching, updating and security issues also became overly complicated to manage.

At its heart, Memo’s core services offer multichannel support, relying on bespoke software and a database with scripted, skill-based routing for every scenario. Their system also extends to a customer portal interfaced with their main database, plus software for their agents. But the complex nature of their business meant that there are lots of moving parts which would need careful migration with no room for error.

Due to the important and diverse nature of their ever-expanding client portfolio, Memo were looking for a scalable and stable cloud-first environment to house their critical infrastructure, and improve their security. After a series of acquisitions, the number of Memo employees doubled, so the company knew they required extra memory, and scalable storage. They also knew that they needed to streamline their processes, aligning services across their offices, whilst ensuring, and improving, the security of patient data. But how could they align multiple teams within one system?

The Solution

As the only contact center in Belgium serving pharmaceutical companies, Memo provides a niche service, and is in something of a unique position. Their business depends on the trust and confidence of pharmaceutical companies to deliver critical call center services. So finding an IT partner familiar with their industry and the complexity of the migration and architecture was not going to be straightforward. 

Fortunately, Memo had an existing partnership with Techne, who handle Cloud, IT services, and IT outsourcing, and specialize in partnering with non-profit organizations in Flanders and Brussels. CEO Michael De Decker was already familiar with Walter Van Hecke at Techne, a certified architect with Microsoft Azure, and he felt reassured by Walter’s expertise and experience of similarly complex moves.  

Having waited seven months for servers from another IT partner, Memo was impressed by Techne’s approach to the Microsoft Azure migration. In the event, Techne was able to migrate the IT architecture for four acquisitions in just one day. Their one-to-one approach to migration also helped to support best practices, beginning with the moving of existing records to a new data center and then analysing performance.
  

Taking an Agile approach, Techne were able to set up and tweak Memo’s new cloud-based system. And in the second phase, they developed and refined the dashboarding to enable valuable oversight of the business. This was a key benefit of the switch to Microsoft Azure, which has helped Memo pivot from a reactive approach to problems, to one where they can anticipate potential issues and prevent them. Increased and improved monitoring also means Memo’s processes stay optimized, and a pronounced shift away from thinking less about servers to adding value through greater focus on business processes.  

Migration to Microsoft Azure with the help of Techne means that Memo can now focus on new and improved ways of working, solving problems, rather than individual incidents, and continually improving user experience. They’re now set up for future success and scalability, which means that there’s a clear roadmap for future acquisitions and the ability for management to clearly track costs and reduce waste through a ‘pay for what you use’ model, rather than having an excess or lack of costly resources.

The Result

Before the initial migration in 2019, Memo has been involved with four acquisitions that have led to increased call center capacity across five offices. They’ve grown to over 130 employees, but scaling their IT systems quickly and efficiently has been made much easier thanks to Techne and their expertise with Microsoft Azure.  
  
As the company has expanded, their IT infrastructure has been able to grow alongside it. There’s no more moving servers or replacing hard drives to add capacity, and there’s a cost saving associated with only paying for the space they need. Going forward, Memo is looking to add further scalability via Azure Virtual Desktop through their successful and ongoing partnership with Techne.