Recruitment/Training Company

This client is a recruitment and training agency based in Central London. They offer a broad range of corporate training plans for employees, sales staff and management, as well as a training and placement service to graduates.

The company had initially required a smart new business phone system when relocating to larger premises in central London. Their primary concerns were that of a minimal capital outlay, modern advanced features that would streamline their productivity and work process, the flexibility to adapt to any major changes in the needs of the business, and a lower Total Cost of Ownership.

Why did the company choose VoiceSmart

During their research, they found VoiceSmart to be an extremely competitively priced business telephone system with a broad array of advanced features and flexibility. Among several competitive vendors and after careful comparison, the company chose VoiceSmart IP Phone System to support their ever growing communications requirements.

The system has the flexibility of being able to route telephone calls through either standard PSTN lines or through an internet telephony provider. With VoiceSmart, the client was able to make significant savings in line rental and calls costs when routing a large portion of their calls through the internet, whilst retaining the reliability of a fixed telephone line.

The company benefitted from the Call Recording and Call Intrusion features, which come at no extra charge. This facilitates the staffs’ training by letting trainees listen to recorded calls and listen in to live sales calls in progress, which was also used to demonstrate the services offered to prospective clients.

As they had at least one staff member who worked from various locations and travelled, the company also takes advantage of VoiceSmart’s remote worker functions, which allows a user to gain access to all the features of the office system from a remote location, such as making and receiving calls to his/her extension, sending text messages and being able to view the status of other users and the telephone lines. All that’s required is a laptop, a headset and a broadband Internet connection.

Features such as this also enabled the company to easily implement a number of new initiatives (in record time) such as the opening of a new virtual office in the north of England, where the users connected to the London office’s telephone system at no extra cost other than an internet connection, and appeared as regular extensions.

A short while after relocating, the company underwent a big expansion programme in which the London office doubled in size, taking on more staff and a greater amount of office floor within the same building. The VoiceSmart system was able to easily adapt to these increased needs; by providing extra internet telephone lines to double the call volume without a corresponding increase in telephone line installation/rental. The license of the VoiceSmart PBX was easily upgraded to accommodate the expansion without the need for an additional hardware. Additionally, the IP business phone system uses regular IT wiring network; hence the company had no need to install expensive telephone wiring separately for the expanded system.

There was also an additional challenge to enable the staff to work in an area where hardware could not be left unattended; the mobility of the system allowed this issue to be resolved by running soft phones on the users’ portable laptops with headsets.

Eupac developed a customised call report application to show live call statistics and ranking of their call centre staff

The company’s latest challenge involved implementation of a customised call logging software designed to highlight the training skills of the company and compare the achievements and progress of the call centre trainees. The details of calls made by the trainees needed to be collated and processed by the call logging software and relevant statistics then projected onto a plasma screen for display in real-time for the benefit of the trainees and visiting prospective corporate clients. The VoiceSmart’s ability to send call information to and be integrated with a third party programmes and scripts has made this possible. A call log programme has since been developed for this purpose. Live call information is now visible to all the trainees and the visitors to the company’s training academy.

The option to make VoIP calls has allowed the company to reduce their call costs signficantly

The company has also benefitted enormously from the cost-effective medium of VOIP - using the internet telephony for telephone calls. Typically, the company’s call charges would normally be in the region of £600 with the current BT Business Phone System. However, routing a proportion of their calls out through the internet is currently saving them in the region 40% and as a result generating a saving of just under £3,000 per annum

They also enjoy significant fixed line cost savings under the IP phone system. Under normal circumstances, they would have incurred an annual cost of £3420 for 18 x lines; however, by routing a proportion of their calls over the internet their annual fixed line cost have been reduced to about £2049 p/a (with 8 ISDN lines from BT and an ADSL connection and corresponding analogue line), giving an annual saving of approximately £1191 p/a.

This means that on an annual basis, the company can expect a saving of approximately £4191 including savings from call costs and line rentals.

Overall the client is very satisfied with the performance and functionality of the business telephone system, as well as its surprising flexibility to adapt to the company’s ever-changing needs.