IMS projects at a glance

IMS established early in the process that they needed a highly flexible, cost effective telecommunications solution which could be easily expanded and entailed minimal internal resources to manage. Several specific facilities were required, including the option to route callers directly to the correct department to speed up answering and minimise the number of times that they are transferred. IMS also needed a means to automatically redirect urgent customer enquiries, received outside of normal UK office hours, to nominated on-call staff.

Cost was an important consideration, but IMS recognised that annual maintenance charges, line rentals, upgrades and changes all add significantly to the ticket price of traditional systems and had to be factored into their comparison.

Hosted Voice (HV) is a fully managed, end to end hosted telephony solution that uses business grade Voice Over IP (VOIP) technology to deliver integrated, flexible telephony. It empowers organisations with increased capabilities and improved productivity whilst reducing the true cost of ownership. In contrast to “on-site” telephone systems, the essential technology resides in an enterprise quality data centre and not on the customer’s site. This hosted arrangement ensures that the core systems benefit from levels of resilience, redundancy and technical support once only available to the largest corporations. It also means that most upgrades and maintenance are carried out centrally at no extra cost and without disruption to the customer’s business. A further advantage is that valuable telephone numbers can usually be transferred to the service and retained regardless of future moves.

The handsets, systems, support, call routing, and dedicated IP connections are all managed by Interface. Mike Taylor is enthusiastic about this one stop approach, “it suits us very well and it’s very reassuring to have a service provider behind us taking responsibility for all aspects of our telecoms.” A clear single bill and named account manager completes the package and further reduces administration.

So how did IMS find the implementation, having experienced the process twice in a few weeks?. For Mike it was “very smooth indeed and our account manager was present on the cutover day to assist with fine tuning and to give a useful briefing to staff in using the new set-up”.

In daily use Hosted Voice is simple to use and has exceeded all expectations. The auto attendant improves inbound call handling and staff regularly use the intuitive web portal and programmable handset keys to tailor the service to their needs. Routing out of hours calls from customers across different time zones to nominated duty staff is also now easily managed from the portal and is updated daily as needed. Mike offers an interesting insight on the benefits of Hosted Voice to IMS “it has significantly increased our contactability at all times and so helps us improve the support we give to our own customers – which is critical to a service company like us”.