How Cornerstone Caregiving built a more cohesive team using OpenPhone

Enterprise phone systems led to more headaches than solutions 

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Cornerstone Caregiving, a 24/7 on-call caregiving service, struggled to find a business phone system that met their unique needs. They tried solutions like Phone.com, RingCentral, and Nextiva. But each time found their enterprise solutions to cause more headaches than relieve them. 

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"The nature of what we do is not 8-5, it’s 24/7. So we constantly have someone on call," says Director of Development & Operations Jessie Grant. "And who is on call rotates, because if you’re on call all the time and getting calls in the middle of the night, that’s going to burn you out pretty quickly."

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Cornerstone Caregiving needed a phone solution that allows staff to share a phone number so that they could quickly and easily dispatch a caregiver to the client's home.

"Sometimes a client would contact a manager who wasn’t on call or not use the main number," says Jessie. "Things were slipping through the cracks."

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When everyone was responsible for their own phone number, it also didn’t allow people to be fully “off” when they weren’t on call. Managers would often receive voice and text messages in the middle of the night to their individual phone numbers, instead of those calls going to a shared, main line that everyone could access.

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Some offices tried to solve these problems by having a physical "on-call" phone that managers would pass off to one another at the end of their shift. That kept client conversations in context and allowed team members to truly be offline when their shift was over, but it presented some obvious logistical challenges.

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Cornerstone Caregiving realized they needed an always-on solution that allows multiple people to staff a shared phone number in shifts to field client and caregiver texts and calls. That way, after a call comes in, their office can dispatch a caregiver to the client’s home. They also needed a business phone system with at least two dedicated numbers for each office. They wanted a main line clients can call or text to request caregiving services. Plus, a separate, shared number the office can use to dispatch, schedule, and recruit caregivers.

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They required a platform that supports both incoming and outgoing communications, and offers 24/7 access to multiple team members. The system also had to be reliable — someone’s care hangs in the balance.