Three offices, one voice

by David Longworth - Thursday, 6th September 2007

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My wife and I set up our first Uniglobe Island Travel franchise in Guernsey in 1992.

Then we opened additional business and leisure travel offices in Bristol in 1998, and later in Oxford. It might seem strange, but the Bristol-Oxford-Guernsey set-up works, and we’ve added around £2m to our turnover over the past three years.

One of the problems we faced as we expanded was that the three offi ces were operating separate phone systems. Although we could call between offices and set up conference calls, it was timeconsuming, messy and expensive.

We were basically running as three distinct offices and each corporate account was effectively tied to one office.

That’s a big problem because the business travel market relies heavily on the phone and email.

We could lose a client if we’re busy in one office or a staff member’s ill and a call goes unanswered – even though there were people in other offices who could have helped.

So I decided to look for something that would allow us to run the three offices together.

Traditional telecoms providers offer “managed services” for this kind of set-up, effectively running a switchboard for you and routing calls to your offices.

But  we had three different suppliers – Telewest, BT and Guernsey Telecom.
No single provider couldcover Bristol, Oxford and cross the hundreds of miles of water to the Channel Islands.

So we installed a new phone system from Mitel, called the 3300 integrated communications platform.

It uses Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology, which means that it routes telephone calls over the internet.

We’re now using one network for all our offices, and managing all our calls centrally. When we make an external call, or when a customer rings up Uniglobe, that gets carried over the phone line.

But then it bounces between our offices on leased data lines – a sort of intranet. Now it seems like we receive fewer calls, because they’re shared between offices.

It’s all done automatically according to which client is calling, what region they’re from, and who their prioritised person is to talk to.

The system cost us £30,000 to set up. Calls between our offices are free and it manages calls in a way you’d never achieve with a free system like Skype.

Without it we’d have had to hire more people to make sure each office could keep up with the volume of calls.

It’s also made us more employee-friendly. One employee has worked in Guernsey for many years and wanted to move to the UK, and she asked if she could still look after her Guernsey clients.

It’s no problem at all with this system. Employees can even work from home, connecting through a simple broadband line.

The service is almost entirely hassle-free. In three years, it’s only gone down twice and never for more than an hour. Even if there’s an outage calls come in as normal to one office via a standard telecoms provider, so they can still be answered.

The only downside was technical support, but we were early adopters. If you install this kind of system today, you’d have a much easier time.

Tags: telecoms, voip, phone system, travel agency, technology in business, business advice,