Meituan-Dianping, China’s O2O Unicorn, Built Better Communication with Yeastar K2 IP PBX

Described as “Trillion Dollar Opportunity”, Online to Offline (O2O) is fast emerging as one of the most significant trends in China retailing as well as drawing significant interests around the world. Meituan-Dianping is China’s No.1 marketplace for services and O2O platform, which connects consumers with local businesses for food takeout, hotel bookings, and movie tickets, among other services.

Headquartered in Beijing, Meituan-Dianping has the other major branch located in Shanghai. As a local life service platform, it requires smooth communication both externally with customers and local merchants and internally among colleagues and departments. For such a service platform, even a minor issue occurring in their communication system will cause great inconvenience to the company.

In 2018, Yeastar provided Meituan-Dianping with K2 IP PBX to build an IP-based communications system with the hot standby solution. Ever since the solution hit the ground running, K2 IP PBX has proved itself to be fully capable of handling the high call traffic, delivering efficiency-improving communication features, helping deliver superior customer service, and streamlining internal communication. One year after, due to its excellent performance, K2 IP PBX was favored by Meituan-Dianping again and implemented in the company’s Beijing headquarter to renovate its communication system.

Challenges & Objectives

For the Shanghai branch:

• Management & Maintenance: Meituan-Dianping’s Shanghai branch has nearly 1000 employees and operates in Shen Ya Times Square and DoBe E Manor. Phone systems in the 2 offices are independent of each other, making central management unfeasible and daily maintenance inconvenient. In addition, the 2 offices used the 3^rdcall recording system independent from the phone systems so that it is difficult to put them into centralized control.
• Inter-office Communication: the disparate phone systems limit communication and collaboration within the organization. Calls cannot be easily transferred between the 2 offices in Shanghai. Besides, it’s often the case that employees in the headquarter and branches need to collaborate but are bothered by the complicated dialing rules and not able to initiate a call with multiple people.

For the Beijing headquarter:

• Painless Upgrade: Meituan-Dianping required keeping their existing phone terminals and other endpoints while retaining the same extension numbers for them. The new phone systems need to be implemented quickly and seamlessly to make sure that they can make the switch in the short term without any business disruption.
• Daily Operation: Meituan-Dianping expected to deploy phone systems in the headquarter and branches under one single telephony network so that employees can just dial extension numbers to reach one another. The new phone system should include features like call recording, conference call, IVR and more to increase efficiency. What’s more, high scalability is necessary for future expansion.

Solution

• Hot Standby: 2 Yeastar K2 IP PBX was deployed in the office in Shen Ya Times Square. One operates as the primary server and the other as the secondary server with all data mirrored to it in real-time. The case is the same in the Beijing headquarter.
• Headquarter & Branch: The Beijing Headquarter and Shanghai Branches were easily connected through Yeastar K2 IP PBX via SIP trunks so that employees are now able to make free inter-office calls.
• Remote Extension Registration: For the Shanghai branch, IP phones in the office in DoBe E Manor were registered to the K2 IP PBX resided in Shen Ya Times Square. In this way, voice calls made here are routed to the K2 IP PBX. Inbound & outbound routes, IVR, ring, call queue, and other settings were all made through the K2 IP PBX.
• Other Configurations: Both the headquarter and branches are able to use ISDN, PSTN lines and SIP trunks with K2 IP PBX, and IVR was set up for different DID numbers. IP phones were configured in bulk using the auto-provisioning feature.

Implemented for the Shanghai Branch in 2018

Implemented for the Beijing headquarter in 2019

Results and Benefits

• Hassle-free Deployment & Seamless Migration

Yeastar K2 IP PBX does not require complicated cabling. There is no need to change the existing phone lines or add new phone lines. The high interoperability with SIP endpoints and SIP/PSTN/ISDN trunks makes the migration even faster and avoids many implementation headaches.

• Smooth Communication among 3 Locations

By introducing Yeastar K2 IP PBX to Meituan-Dianping, the headquarter and branch offices drastically benefit from easier communication. Employees in Beijing and Shanghai can just dial the extension numbers to reach one another, and calls can be transferred easily to realize maximum efficiency.

• Centralized Management & Easy Scalability

The company can now configure, control and update its phone systems simply through the intuitive Web GUI. As for future expansion, Yeastar K2 IP PBX supports up to 2000 users, 500 concurrent calls, and 400 VoIP trunks, which is an ideal solution for large enterprises with either a single site or complex and multi-site network.

• Better Collaboration & Enhance Efficiency

A slew of efficiency-improving VoIP features brought by Yeastar K2 IP PBX are highly welcomed by Meituan-Dianping. Here are a few features rather useful for the company.

Conference: Employees are able to dial the conference extension number to attend the conference anywhere and anytime. The visual conference panel makes it even easier to organize and manage conferences.

Softphone: the free mobile & desktop softphone, Linkus, enable employees to take their extensions with them even on the go. With Linkus available on Windows, macOS, iOS, and Androids, employees can manage and control their calls more easily and realize faster response time.

Call Recording: the company can now automatically record every internal, external and conference call without 3rd party system，and listen to the recordings through the intuitive PBX Web GUI easily.

IVR: Yeastar K2 IP PBX supports the multi-level multi-lingual auto attendant. The company can upload customized prompts and set desired destinations to optimize the customer call experience.

Queue: this feature helps automatically distribute incoming calls to certain destinations to queue up while waiting for an available agent to take their calls, greatly improving customer satisfaction.