Essex Motor Factors have been a client of ours for many years. They had a clever telephone system designed and built by their Operations Director, Matt Little. Inbound calls were delivered via an ISDN circuit in each branch. There was a gateway that routed calls from ISDN into their existing IP based telephone system. Outbound calls are sent via our service as a method of reducing costs and adding a layer of failover. This system has worked reliably for many years however they had outgrown it and knew further savings could be made by cancelling ISDN lines. The system was also lacking in features. For instance a member of their team was due to move back to Hull, a long commute to Braintree! Team members also work in other branches and it was difficult to track down which extension they were on.
Whilst we could have utilised their existing IP based telephone system for some of the solution after meeting and discussing future plans with Matt it was actually beneficial for Essex Motor Factors to use our hosted service instead. By porting all of their numbers we could not only offer massive cost savings as the ISDN rental wouldn’t be required it also mean’t as calls would be coming through our cloud service we could distribute them around the whole company, ensuring calls were answered quicker and the operation was more effective.
The other factors that made this decision were firstly, Fibre broadband (FTTC) was now available in 3 out of 4 branches. This meant bandwidth wasn’t an issue so data and voice could share the same connection. To ensure call quality was not affected by internet traffic a quality of service (QoS) system was configured giving dedicated bandwidth to voice calls. In the 4th site 2 ADSL connections were used, one dedicated to data and the other to voice.
Secondly, as the team wanted to be able to work in different branches our Hot desk feature was very attractive. They simply login as their own extension number on any phone handset within the company and make and receive calls as normal. This means direct dial calls and other members of the team will reach them on just one number, where ever they are. This feature isn’t limited to one of their branches, they also have an extension in the United States they login to! They were also able to continue to employ the team member who moved back to Hull.
Once again, with our 30 day rolling contract, Essex Motor Factors can add and remove users on a monthly basis with no penalties.