Fife Housing
Business Challenge
Fife Housing Association manages over 2500 homes across the county of Fife in east-central Scotland. It has two locations in Dunfermline and Lochgelly.
The Association needed to replace its aging telephony system as it was no longer meeting requirements and the lease on the system was about to expire.
This presented the Association with the opportunity to upgrade its telephony system and add new features that were not available when the original system was purchased.
The Association wanted the capability to route calls to key members of staff and external agencies. With just one receptionist and high call volumes – peaking at 900 per day – it needed to find a way to manage peak levels of incoming calls efficiently, directing them to the correct person or department as required automatically. It also wanted to be able to route important calls to external contractors so that tenants could register maintenance calls as quickly and without having to make second call. Fife Housing wanted to make use of this feature both during and outside normal office hours so tenants would always be able to get the help that they needed at any time and on any day of the week.
Fife Housing also wanted a solution that would provide call recording. This would be used to improve the way in which calls are handled. This feature needed to be easy to use as the Association wanted to record and play-back calls without having to go back to their supplier for technical assistance.
Solution
Fife Housing Association spoke with a number of telephony resellers and finally looked at three credible solutions proposed by locally-based suppliers. Glasgow-based Siebert Telecom Solutions had supplied Fife Housing’s previous analogue system and established a good relationship with the Association. Siebert recommended Avaya IP Office as it addressed all of the business challenges identified and provided scalability to future-proof the investment.
The 40 users in the main office make use of standard Avaya 5420 handsets and VoIP connectivity to the Lochelly office is provided over a virtual private network (VPN), which was set up by Siebert. Further use of VoIP is being considered for an additional planned location in Dunfermline, possibly utilising a line-of-sight laser connection.
Fife Housing has also deployed call traffic monitoring software as part of its strategy. This is used as a safeguard to check on call volumes and costs. It can glean a lot of management information from the reports and identify where bottlenecks are developing and how to allocate staff to different services at different times. This means that it can ensure that the right numbers of people are available to cope with peak times.
Results
Fife Housing Association has found the IP Office 406 system to be ideal for its needs. The flexibility of the auto-attendant and call routing capabilities have been really useful, enabling the organisation to tailor the system to meet the needs of its tenants and improve its service to them. Customers have responded positively to the new set-up. With the previous system, tenants would be left in a queue for too long or calls would be lost. In contrast, the new system enables calls to be managed swiftly, efficiently and reliably. The Association has had no complaints since it was installed.
Avaya IP Office has also allowed the Association to extend its telephone system to its service office in Lochgelly, saving the expense of installing a separate system at this location.
Key benefits of the IP Office 406 solution for Fife Housing Association
Consistent, reliable performance
Fife Housing Association receives a very high number of calls from its tenants and every call is important as tenants are usually calling because they have a question about their accommodation or some kind of problem. It is vital that they can always get through to the right person and that the system is robust and reliable.
Added flexibility
The system is flexible with a clear upgrade path. Fife Housing Association is considering adding another office to the system in the near future, possibly using the laser line-of- sight connection. Looking further ahead, Fife plans to use VoIP more as well. As the organisation expands, this will make it relatively simple and inexpensive to connect new offices to the telephony system, simply by installing a new router and some handsets.
Management Reporting
Fife uses call traffic monitoring software which it uses as a safeguard to check on call volumes and costs. Management information is extracted from the reports to identify where bottlenecks are developing and how to allocate staff to different services at different times. This means that required staffing levels can be forecast and provided for more accurately.
Customer comments
“IP Office has worked well for us. It’s allowed us to extend our telephone system to a service office in Lochgelly, which is 20 miles from here. We did not want to go to the expense of installing a new telephone system for that office and we’ve been able to extend the system we have here using voice over IP and that has worked very well.”
“We also operate an emergency service at weekends where we program the Avaya system to forward incoming calls to mobile phones of tradesmen who can help them if they have an emergency in their home. That’s proved to be very useful in practice.”
“We looked at various systems including Panasonic and Toshiba and Avaya came up tops in all of the reviews. We did some research and contacted other organisations to ask what they had and Avaya came out on top every time. In conjunction with that we also contacted some of Siebert’s customers to ask how the implementation and installation had gone and were very satisfied with the reports we had back. I was impressed by the professionalism and the detail of the project plan and also the assistance we were given in setting up the system.”
Sonia Raeburn, Senior Finance and IT Officer, Fife Housing Association