"We were really big on educating our user community on what it was they were going to get and how that was going to be different," Krupinski says. "We pushed our education internally hard. We went out and took the time to mimic, Day One, this is how you were used to doing your phone calls before we came in; and then we're going to come back and try to do things for efficiency reasons. Where some mistakes were made is a lot of people come in and say, 'Look at all these wonderful things you can do and we're going to do them all Day One.' You end up confusing your user community."

On its intranet, WesBanco produced a Web site that featured every phone being deployed and how it worked. On the technical side, the bank's IT staff compiled a copious checklist of the calling behaviors and patterns of each department - hunt groups, special features -- for inclusion in a companywide deployment template.

"That's how we became more successful with Extension Mobility and Toll Bypass and putting in an intercompany directory," Krupinski says.

Extension Mobility enables WesBanco staff members at a remote branch to download all of the attributes of their home branch phone -- including speed-dial settings and voice-mail greetings - by logging into an IP phone.

UCM and the IP phones were tested and deployed in the IT department first. The IT staff took snapshots of the network to determine how it behaved in its best and worst conditions. The bank then scrutinized the impact of adding voice on the network and then video, ATM traffic and security alarms.

"We have to be very tuned in to how to shape that traffic appropriately," Krupinski says.

WesBanco then rolled it out to a portion of its headquarters facility, and then once those rollouts moved, the bank started picking groups and geographies for deployment.

"By the end of the project, rolling over a branch was nothing," Krupinski says. "The deployments became so standardized it was like installing a PC. In an hour to two hours, we'd have that branch up. You can never do that with the multiple PBXs and key systems in the environment that we had."

The most difficult problem the bank faced was coordinating number porting with the local telcos.

"When we rolled into a branch we would port all the numbers over and take control over them," Krupinski says. "But when you issue ports and you work with the local telcos, they give you a date and you got to be ready on that date to have the phones flipped over so people can make their calls. If you don't, then nobody can make any calls, the branch doesn't have any communications. But sometimes the telcos would do that a day early."

Next up for the bank is multimedia conferencing using the Cisco Unified MeetingPlace application. This will allow personnel to dynamically schedule videoconference calls with other staffers instead of setting up a specific day and time to conduct them.

WesBanco is also exploring the use of virtual sales experts who will be able to answer questions and begin applications when customers walk into branches. Unified Contact Center could allow the virtual sales experts to "meet" with customers from almost anywhere -- a call center, another branch, or from headquarters miles away.