St. Louis-based Linguistic Services Provider Saves Money with Cloud-Based VoIP and Unified Communications

The Challenge: A Phone System Holding Back Interpreter Dispatch

For many small businesses, the gap between demand and capacity is a staffing problem. For LAMP, the bottleneck was their phone system.

The days of a receptionist working from a paper contact list and an analog desk phone are behind the businesses that thrive. LAMP’s legacy phone setup was exactly that — and it had become a genuine constraint on growth. The process of routing incoming requests to the right interpreter, managing multiple client accounts, and coordinating assignments was tedious, time-consuming, and prone to gaps that cost time and money.

Unable to grow at the rate of demand because their outdated telephones were limiting efficiency, LAMP approached Phonewire — a business communications provider and Switchvox partner in nearby Fairview Heights, Illinois — to find a better way.

The Obstacle: Budget and Contract Lock-In

LAMP’s situation wasn’t unusual for a growing small organization: they needed a better system but faced two practical constraints — they didn’t have a budget allocated for new phone hardware, and they were still locked into their existing phone contract.

The solution to the budget constraint was built into the platform itself: Switchvox Cloud doesn’t require upfront hardware investment. As a hosted, cloud-based system, there’s no on-site PBX to purchase, no servers to install, and no rack infrastructure to maintain. The cost structure shifts from capital expenditure to a predictable monthly service — which is exactly what a growing organization without dedicated IT resources needs.

The Solution: A Custom UC Configuration for a Multilingual Business

What Phonewire built for LAMP wasn’t an off-the-shelf phone system deployment. LAMP’s business model — connecting clients in multiple languages to qualified interpreters — required a communications architecture designed around how interpretation services actually work. Switchvox Cloud’s flexibility made that possible.

Beyond the interpreter routing architecture, Switchvox Cloud also gave LAMP capabilities they had never had on their legacy system — video calling and conferencing for remote interpretation sessions, unified communications features that connected staff regardless of location, and the ability to manage the entire system through a web-based interface without dedicated IT staff.

How the Cost Savings Work

The title of this case study promises savings — here’s specifically how that plays out for a business like LAMP:

• No hardware investment — Switchvox Cloud is hosted, so LAMP replaced their legacy system with no upfront PBX or server purchase
• Eliminated wasted time — the old manual dispatch process wasted significant staff time on every assignment; automated routing means interpreters are connected faster, more accurately, and with less overhead
• Switchvox costs less than comparable alternatives — the hosted platform came in below what other pre-built systems were quoting for equivalent functionality
• Capacity unlocked — when the phone system was the constraint on interpreter dispatch volume, growth was artificially limited; removing that constraint means more assignments covered per day with the same team
• Contract exit enabled a better deal — leaving the legacy phone contract, while delayed, opened the door to a system that was both more capable and more cost-effective on a per-month basis

What Makes This Case Study Different

Most VoIP case studies describe a simple upgrade: old system replaced, features improved, costs reduced. The LAMP deployment is something more specific — a communications platform built around a genuinely unusual operational model. Very few businesses need to route calls by language code to separate interpreter queues, assign dedicated numbers to each client account, and manage multi-language video sessions from the same platform.

The fact that Switchvox Cloud’s flexibility could accommodate all of that — and do it for an organization without a dedicated IT team or a hardware budget — is the case for Phonewire’s approach to every implementation: the right system for how your business actually operates, not the closest standard configuration available.