Why it’s Time for Hosted Voice

International Magazine Services (IMS) is a joint venture between Time Inc (a Time Warner company) and Newsweek Inc, parents of the World’s two largest weekly news magazines. IMS are specialists in managing magazine printing and distribution on a truly international scale with customers and suppliers throughout Europe, Africa, Asia and Latin America.

According to Managing Director Mike Taylor, effective IT and telecoms services play a “hugely important” role in successfully running this large logistics operation across multiple time zones. The relocation of IMS’ Berkshire Head Office, in early 2010, provided the perfect opportunity to explore the latest in IP telephony. With help from communications specialists Neeter Solutions Ltd, IMS first identified their objectives and key requirements before considering various options
for site based PBXs and Interface’s Hosted Voice IP telephony.

LIMS 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.

Once the options were considered, Hosted Voice from Interface Advantage quickly emerged as the clear front runner.

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.

One aspect of Hosted Voice that particularly attracted Mike was its flexibility. Adding new users, homeworkers, features and even other sites is simple and low cost because they don’t require system upgrades. This flexibility was tested sooner than IMS had anticipated when legal delays in finalising the lease for the new offices forced a last minute postponement of the move. As Mike explains “We were sharing our old telephone system with a partner company and they were still moving out to the original timeframe, potentially causing serious disruption to our telecoms before we could move”. A discussion with their account managerconfirmed that there was a simple answer. The new IP handsets were simply plugged into spare data points in the “old” building and Interface remotely reconfigured the service to use IMS’ existing broadband capacity. This saved the day by providing interim, but fully functional, telecoms in advance of the office move which took place a month or so later.

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”.

And summing up the support IMS have received “I think the true test of a supplier is when things go wrong or when we need their need help, and although we’ve had few issues, Interface’s customer service has been very impressive”.