About the Business
Our client is an architecture practice based in north London. The firm has over 30 years' industry experience and their architectural portfolio spans the residential and mixed-use sectors, with a specialist focus on the regeneration of brownfield sites.
Industry: Architecture
Organisation Size: 50-100 employees
Service Areas: VoIP Telephony
Challenge
BT made the public announcement back in 2020 to discontinue offering and operating ISDN lines by 2025. Overall with the introduction of voice over IP technology over the past 10 or so years it had become apparent that a heavy decline in ISDN will become inevitable.
ISDN also known as Integrated Services Digital Network, is a service that delivers broadcast-quality voice and data continuously over public switched telephone connections. In the most basic format – it is the phone lines used by businesses.
ISDN has been in used for many years by businesses ranging from ISDN2, ISDN 8, 30 and beyond offering business simultaneous phones calls over a single telephone number all operated centrally by BT.
One of the many reasons that this technology is now being retired is the introduction of voice over IP technology. In other words no longer the business has to wait many months before BT is able to deliver or upgrade existing infrastructure as a result of the business either moving, expanding or even shrinking throughout the periods of downturn.
In return VoIP offers a more reliable, secure and efficient solution and offers more flexibility to the employees providing them with the availability to remotely answer and make phone calls from any location.
The business was progressing through a period of growth and acknowledged that the current solution is no longer offering the flexibility required especially for remote working and employee productivity. A more reliable solution was needed to be implemented.
Solution
+ Migrated the current primary telephone numbers of the business along with the employee DDI’s away from BT and to the VoIP telephony provider.
+ Carried out a few brain-storming session with the client and the extended teams to understand the structure of the new telephony solution.
+ Planned out the allocation of DDI’s, incoming call routing, in hours and out of hours messaging, receptionist phone answering, voice mail options.
+ Implemented the necessary physical handsets required for receptionists, employees, meeting room conferencing units and configured them with the VoIP solution.
+ Deployed VoIP software across external laptops which were being used remotely across the remote workforce.
Outcome
The business has now fully migrated to a cloud hosted VoIP solution and is benefitting from offering its remote workers the ability to communicate and collaborate irrespective of their locations.
Furthermore, as the business is expanding and going through various stages of growth the telephony infrastructure can seamlessly and reliably expand and shrink with the business on demand both from a cost perspective but also the availability of the solution to new employees.
Furthermore, a whole host of new features became available to the client such as individual voice mail per employee, voicemail to email, voicemail transcript to email, missed call email notification, out of hours routing and more.
The business is due to move offices in the next 8 months and with the presence of a cloud hosted VoIP telephony solution the move will be quite seamless. This now means that the business is not required to move any hardware or physical telephony infrastructures between offices or to wait for to face unnecessary wait times with their telephony provider to migrate the lines to the new site.
The old telephony system including all of the handsets was removed from the infrastructure and recycled with one of our green certified recycling partners in London.
Services Taken: Managed Services (VoIP Telephony), Professional Services, Licensing.
