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New phone system improves company's communication, reduces costs and boosts profitability

takeITon research revealed that 44% of employees in the East of England felt that poor IT stopped them from doing their jobs well. By investing in a hosted communication system, a business in Essex enabled its employees to work more efficiently and, as a result, boost its bottom line.

Essex Ford has five retail and two service locations across the county. It offers a full line of new and used cars, parts and service, and employs more than 200 employees.

Having grown rapidly, it was only a matter of time before Essex Ford started to outgrow its communications set-up. Like any fledgling business, the car dealership had simply added a new communications system each time it opened a new location. So although Essex Ford operated as one company, its communications were run as if its operations were separate businesses.

This type of set-up is manageable when a business only has two or three sites but Essex Ford had several operational sites and was beginning to surpass its bandwidth capacity. It was also expensive: internal calls between sites alone were costing the company nearly £12,000 each year.

Communications capacity to match growth

Essex Ford wanted to streamlines its communications to reduce costs and improve its profitability. What it wanted was an integrated corporate system with a centralised location to handle incoming calls, a common voice mail system, and an effective method for using direct dial numbers.

Essex Ford invested in a VoIP hosted PBX system from VanillaIP and BroadWorks.

Calls made using VoIP (Voice over IP) travel over the data network, which means there's no need for separate voice networks. So, the system has simplified the Ford dealer's administration and brought all sites together into one integrated system with centralised reception, unified voice mail, and direct dial numbers for all employees.

According to Mark Reilly, finance director of Essex Ford: "The hosted VOIP solution from BroadSoft and VanillaIP has changed our mindset from thinking of our organisation as seven separate sites to thinking of it as one integrated business."

New IP phones have the advantage over older handsets in simplifying moves, adds and changes (MACs), as they retain the same number and phone preferences wherever they're plugged in. This meant that during a recent staff move, Essex Ford's employees simply took their IP phones with them and plugged them into the network connection at their new workplace.

Saving costs

Perhaps more importantly for the company's bottom line, the VoIP system is saving the dealership about £50,000 a year. "The IT solution has helped improve the company's profitability," says Reilly.  These substantial savings come from eliminating the cost of internal calls (communications are now run effectively as one system, so employees don't have to dial out to reach another location) and not having to hire multiple reception staff for each of its locations. Bear in mind that this doesn't include the savings Essex Ford expects to make on call costs, which will push its overall savings even higher: "Conservatively, we believe this will add about another £10,000," adds Reilly.

As it's a hosted service, the advantage for a small to medium-sized business like Essex Ford, is that the company doesn't have to manage or maintain the expensive PBX equipment on its sites. Another benefit is that it can use the type of sophisticated calling options - such as conference, video, fax mail, call centres and mobile integration - that usually only bigger companies have access to. For instance, the BroadWorks Receptionist option, offered by VanillaIP as MiReception, provides easy access to call queue information, quick search capability, and the ability to direct calls to users' mobile phones, voice mail, and email.

Had Essex Ford not made the investment in upgrading its communications, Reilly is under no illusions about the position the company would be in now: "I believe that we would have spent more money in resource trying to make our fragmented switchboards work efficiently," he says. "There is no question that the solution provides a much more efficient method of working."

Need to know: key lessons

  • Understand your needs: find out if your business has outgrown its communications setup
  • Listen to your employees: they are on the front line and can give you the best insight into what your business needs
  • Choose the right solution: make technology flex to suit your business not vice versa

The top line: VoIP

  • Significantly reduces the cost of communicating via the phone, especially for businesses with more than one site
  • Enables you to streamline your communications into a single, centralised location to handle incoming calls and voice mail.
  • IP phones retain the same number and phone preferences wherever they're plugged in making hot-desking of office moves easy

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