Benco Dental
Challenge
Reducing Conversational Distractions and Protecting Speech Privacy in a Large and Busy Modern Office and Call Center
Benco Dental is the largest privately owned, full-service distributor of dental supplies, dental equipment, dental consulting and equipment services in the United States. With over 1,300 employees and rapidly growing, the company needed a new space for their main headquarters and its 400 employees based in Pittston, Pennsylvania. A desire for natural light was the number one request by employees for their new office, and the new 2-floor, 111,600 square foot office would boast copious amounts of it due to the fact that the open office area would get all of the space’s windows, while the private offices would occupy the middle of the space. The walls on the second floor (where the company’s 150 person call center would be located) would be completely made of glass from the floor to the ceiling to further maximize the amount of light coming in. Walls would be minimized and cubicle partitions would be shortened.
Benco Dental’s previous office had issues with noise distractions due in part to the fact that many employees are often talking on the phone (nearly two thirds of employees at headquarters work in the office’s call center). Facilities Management knew they’d have to address the office noise problem in the new space, especially since there would be fewer walls and partitions to block sound, and office noise would be more likely to reverberate off of the large glass walls.
Facility Manager Bob Hunt remembered hearing about sound masking technologies from time to time and thought that the solution might be effective for the new Benco Dental space. Sound masking is the process of adding a low level, unobtrusive background sound to an environment to cover up excess speech noise making the affected environment more comfortable, private, and free of excess noise distractions. Hunt asked his office furniture dealer, BMC Office Furniture, if they carried any sound masking products. BMC took Hunt to another office that had QtPro™ sound masking from Cambridge Sound Management installed in it and provided Hunt with a demonstration of the system’s power. Having left impressed with its ability to make offices more acoustically comfortable, Hunt agreed to have QtPro installed throughout Benco Dental’s new office space.
Solution
Qt® 600 Sound Masking System
QtPro sound masking from Cambridge Sound Management was installed throughout both floors of Benco Dental’s 111,600 square feet of office space. Small, barely visible emitters (speakers) were placed in the drop ceiling throughout both floors. The emitters were connected by cables to an intuitive Qt 600 control module residing in the server room.
Result
A More Pleasant Work Environment
Employees notice the new office is more acoustically comfortable than Benco Dental’s previous office and are pleased with the copious amounts of natural light the new office receives. The barely noticeable emitters help ensure that Benco Dental’s modern office vision wasn’t compromised, and the invisible nature of the masking noise ensure the office gets the most natural light possible without walls or partitions to block it out.
“We love QtPro – once you have sound masking installed in your office, you wonder how you ever lived without it,” says Hunt. “In fact, one day the masking was accidentally turned off and the call center immediately called me to have it turned back on – that was 7AM on a Monday!”
About Benco Dental
Benco Dental is the largest privately owned, full-service distributor of dental supplies, dental equipment, dental consulting and equipment services in the United States. Founded in 1930 by Benjamin Cohen, the company has remained family owned and focused on the unique mission of “delivering success smile after smile”. Headquartered in Pittston, Pennsylvania, Benco Dental is the nation’s fastest-growing dental distributor with more than 50 regional showroom locations and five distribution centers servicing more than 30,000 dental professionals in all 50 states. Benco Dental provides more supply and equipment options than any other full-service dental distributor – an offering enhanced by a comprehensive suite of services, including office design, equipment repair, practice coaching, financial planning and wealth management, real estate consulting, recruitment, clinical education, financing, peer-to-peer learning and dental specific technology solutions. These services are supported by more than 400 professionally trained sales representatives and 290 factory-trained service technicians.
About Cambridge Sound Management
Cambridge Sound Management, Inc., the world’s largest provider of sound masking solutions, manufactures QtPro and DynasoundPro sound masking systems to help organizations across multiple industries protect speech privacy, reduce noise distractions, and increase workplace productivity. Cambridge Sound Management’s proprietary sound masking technology works by emitting a uniform, barely perceptible background sound at the frequencies of human speech. Cost-effective and easy to install, their sound masking, office paging, and background music systems are deployed in hundreds of millions of square feet of space throughout the world including commercial organizations, healthcare facilities, financial services, government agencies, and educational institutions. Cambridge Sound Management is a Biamp Systems company.