The customer is a higher education provider built upon the values of promoting academic, social, and cultural qualities, which make for better citizens. Effective communication and collaboration are vital for this customer.
The Business Challenge
The customers telephony system was dated. Not only was this expensive for them to maintain, but they were also experiencing technical faults which caused downtime for their colleagues.
They needed to introduce a new telephony system that was reliable, flexible and cost-effective, but they could not risk disruption to service as part of the transition between systems. It was of vital importance that staff remain available to support operational needs throughout the changeover.
To avoid the need for further short-term investments, the new system had to be future-proof and enable flexible ways of working. It was also vitally important that any data and communications had adequate security in place to keep internal and external interactions confidential.
They needed a solutions partner who could provide the technical expertise and consultancy to ensure that all of these needs were met.
The Solution
The customer chose to partner with Daisy Corporate Services to address its telephony challenges and empower them to deliver a better customer experience. Daisy’s consultants worked closely with the customer’s IT team to scope the requirements and recommend the best solution to meet their unique needs. Together, they decided that the solution to meet every requirement started with the installation of a secure Mitel IP virtualised telephony platform.
The new platform successfully removed the ongoing issue of hardware faults relating to the legacy system and gave staff the option to work from different locations, or even from home.
To avoid interruption of service, the new system was introduced with a phased approach. Phase one began by migrating 450 staff members onto the new system, while the remainder temporarily continued to use the existing infrastructure. The second phase saw Daisy roll out the full telephony system to the whole workforce, including the option to scale up to 5,000 users.
To ensure the customer’s staff were empowered to communicate and collaborate efficiently, Daisy also rolled out Unified Communications (UC) applications to all licenced users where required. This included integration of apps in mobile and desktop devices also provided by Daisy, to enable conferencing and video chat functionality. This solution enabled the customer to maintain full control over its data security, as the virtualised platform is hosted from it’s own on-site servers.
The Results
By virtualising their system, the customer was able to mitigate the risk of downtime caused by hardware failures. They were also able to reduce overheads relating to equipment procurement.
There have been no major outages or issues since the new system was installed, meaning the customer has succeeded in improving the efficiency of their systems and saving staff resources that would previously have been used troubleshooting.
Teams using the telephony system can be back online quickly with the support of a dedicated team of Daisy experts that are on hand to provide support, ranging from initial set up to password resets.
The customer was assigned a dedicated Daisy project manager, who initiated various workstreams to feed into the project plan. This enabled the customer’s wider team to see exactly where they were in the project and what the latest updates to the progress and risk registers were at a single glance. Migrating to a new platform can be daunting for teams that cannot afford to be offline for extended periods, and Daisy’s phased approach and resilient deployment strategy gave the team confidence throughout the transition.
