SpliceCom Make Life Easier For Dudley Building Society
Introduction
It's been an exciting year for Dudley Building Society. Formed in 1858 the independent society remains true to its original core philosophy of serving the communities in and around the Black Country and West Midlands. Committed to providing customers, with a modern mutual experience, combining traditional building society qualities with the ability to meet the needs of today's savers and borrowers Dudley Building Society underwent a re-brand during 2013. Alongside a re-vamped corporate logo and website, this included a fresh and vibrant makeover for all six branches and a head office migration from the Dudley branch office to a brand new building offering 6,000 square feet of space over two floors.
The Requirement
A new head office requires a new telephone system. In this case one which would be capable of underpinning new and innovative business requirements in the future, in addition to handling present day inter-office and customer communications more efficiently. Dudley Building Society had previously been using a Meridian Option 11 phone system supplied by BT, a product first introduced in the late 1980's, so, like many business in their situation, the office move gave them the chance to evaluate the latest in voice technology.
"From the very start of the process, whatever system we ended up choosing for our communication infrastructure across the new head office and the 6 existing branches, we were very clear that would only work with a local company for its installation, maintenance and support," said Chief Executive Jeremy Wood. We wanted a flexible modern system that would grow with us over the years, both in terms of the number of users and lines attached and in how we could use it to support new services, products and initiatives. Our key requirements were management reporting, both live and historical, that was both easy to use and understand, along with call recording, which was to be integrated if at all possible. Handsets that were easy to use and a system that was easy to manage, in terms of adds, moves and changes were also important,' continued Wood.
The Search
The society started their quest by looking at all the latest systems available to them and quickly arrived at a shortlist of three to evaluate further; SpliceCom, Cisco and Mitel. They also wanted to investigate hosted telephony, however, this option was swiftly discounted, due to the every-day management and control of this system remaining largely in the hands of the service provider rather than the society. An external consultant was then employed to benchmark the three systems and make his recommendations. 'We found this process very beneficial' said Wood, 'and in the end found that the SpliceCom system provided by far the best value for money when we compared features and functionality with price,' said Wood.
The Installation
With the selection process completed the total solution was provided and installed over a three week period by SpliceCom Community partner Voice2Voice, with the head-office being commissioned first, followed by a staged rollout to the 6 branch offices. To complement the SpliceCom system they also provided the network service infrastructure ' minutes for voice calls, ISDN, SIP and Leased Lines - alongside a mobile network solution for 25 handsets and a coverall maintenance contract.
The Business Benefits
"We now have a single unified telephone system connecting some 90 users across 7 sites, with everybody using the same SpliceCom PCS 562 IP phone,' says Jeremy Wood. 'Vision gives us all the relevant management information we need to understand the activity in key departments and the fully integrated call recording gives us the ability to listen to staff calls for training purposes and make changes quickly to rectify specific problems."
"Whilst our branches are quite small, we needed voice connectivity between them so we could move inbound calls around effortlessly if required. The new SpliceCom system allows us to do this along with the ability to see who is on the phone at the branch site from the head office, thanks to the single, distributed database it employs. Because of this we have greatly improved communication between our 7 sites," states Wood.
The User Benefits
All Dudley Building Society employees' also run SpliceCom's Navigate Phone Partner app on their PCs, which, amongst a host of other telephone control features, allows them to automatically click and dial numbers from Microsoft Outlook. The society has also found SpliceCom's iPCS app for SmartPhones very useful for those members of staff who are not office based. Running this app on their mobile phones allows office based employees to be able to dial them by extension at no cost, with the added benefit that all calls made in this manner are still recorded.
The Future
The final word goes to Jeremy Wood. 'The SpliceCom system delivered tangible benefits for the society from day one, simplifying communications and allowing us to see exactly what's going on across the business. We know that it gives us plenty of room for expansion as we grow our business and we've even started to think about the extra things we could do should we choose to integrate it with our CRM system at some point in the future.'