Accentuating VoIP’s positives

Having the right telephony system is mission-critical to most businesses, though in the case of Accent Blinds, a blind business with eight shop fronts and 10 sites nationally, where customer requests for quotes and installations are its bread and butter, that maxim applies doubly.

Accent Blinds CEO Ken Dawes, said the beginning of 2005 was one of the worst periods the home renovations industry had experienced in the last 10 years and to actually justify the investment in a new communications system was a huge decision.

It was therefore essential that Accent found a workable, efficient system that could not only save on call costs, but handle and direct the volume of calls it was receiving daily to the appropriate people, whilst also providing valuable customer feedback.

Antiquated system

Dawes said the decision to upgrade the company’s telephony system to an IP-based model was not taken lightly, and was only arrived at after the company had struggled with its traditional PABX system for over a year.

“Our previous systems always had mysterious things happen to them. Customers would be kept on hold for an eternity, logs of calls were banking up until customers would either give up themselves or inadvertently be hanged up on.

“To put it bluntly, our customer service levels were not only damaging our reputation but affecting our bottom line,” Dawes said. “Instead of responding to customer enquiries, my customer service team was spending most of each day trying to ascertain how customer calls were disappearing or dropping out and why waiting times for calls were so excessive. It therefore became apparent to us that we needed to fix the problem, and fix it quickly.”

Dawes said the company had actually been given a demonstration of an IP-based telephony system around 18 months prior to their decision to go ahead with one.

“At that time, we decided it was ridiculously expensive so we decided to upgrade our existing Samsung legacy system, something which proved a false economy, after being promised that it would work,” he said. This involved the upgrade of software and the purchase of new servers. “We basically did everything to overhaul our existing infrastructure, but it finally became apparent to us that there were fundamental deficiencies with our call management systems.”

Roughly 18 months after their initial demonstration, Accent decided to have another look at an Avaya-based IP system.

Up until that point, Dawes said that he and his company had little knowledge of VoIP and its possibilities and an existing relationship with Accent’s IT manager and Sydney VoIP integrator Planet Communications led to another demonstration.

Planet, in conjunction with national IP equipment distributor and integrator IPL Communications, then put together a package which Dawes said was simply irresistible.

“They had released a SME version of an Avaya system which was cheaper, with far more features that we could specifically adapt to our business, making it a truly compelling proposition.”

According to Planet Communications managing director Geoff Milton-White, Planet and IPL looked at Accent’s system in its entirety before deciding on the Avaya IP Office platform, a modular IP telephony solution designed specifically for the small business market.

“Amongst the things we discovered when we looked at their existing system was that the Automatic Attendance function was losing callers, the company’s IVR (interactive voice response) wasn’t working, and was actually losing a number of calls, and that some callers were actually being inadvertently hung up on after waiting sometimes for up to 15 minutes.

“Another major problem for them was the flaw in the way that its remote sites were connecting back to the central office and the way that calls were being transferred from one office to another. IP Office allowed calls to be directed seamlessly to exactly where they were intended, as well as answering incoming calls.

In addition, by automatically transferring calls through to head office, where they could then be redirected to the appropriate shop front, shops no longer have to answer incoming calls which are not directed towards them, leaving more time for face-to-face customer contact.”

Under those circumstances, it was not Milton-White said it was not difficult to pitch the system, given that it could not only fix all of Accent’s customer call-related problems, but also give them a significant return on investment from call costs in a very short space of time.

Fast, seamless integration

IPL and Planet then set about the implementation of the Avaya IP Office platform across Access Blinds’ contact centre and retail branch offices.

As a secure, converged voice and data system specifically designed for small and medium businesses, the implementation went relatively seamlessly, despite the large number of applications on the system.

“There was some fairly complicated programming involved in the initial set up, which is where IPL Communications’ professional services division was of tremendous assistance,” Milton-White said.

IPL Communications director Dean Joscelyne added that the deployment was a very good example of a distributor and reseller working together to ensure the success of a customer deployment.

Dawes said the new system had experienced very few teething problems and that calls had only very rarely dropped out. “By and large, compared to our previous system, this one’s been faultless.” Milton-White added that the rollout had gone remarkably smoothly and had suited the customer’s needs almost perfectly.

“Accent Blinds achieved a return on investment within a month. The applications on its new IP telephony system have not only simplified its business processes and increased efficiency, but have improved sales by a huge margin in a downturning market.”

Return on investment

Dawes said the cost of setting up around 70 seats, including 24 callers in the call centre, across 10 sites, including all showrooms, came in at about $150,000.

This included WiFi decked handsets, of which three or four were assigned to each shopfront. He also said the company had started to see a huge return on investment almost immediately. “We experienced a sales jump of nearly 50 percent in the first month.

“That is a massive result for us. To put it into some perspective, I would estimate that we started saving at least $1000 a day due to the way in which we were able to take all customer calls quickly and send them to exactly where they needed to go.”

This, he added, had enabled Accent Blinds to save thousands of dollars in potential sales that were previously lost in abandoned calls. In addition, Dawes said Accent had saved tens of thousands of dollars per annum on call costs between its offices.

“Prior to the upgrade, calls between our offices in Newcastle, Wollongong, Penrith and Seven Hills were being charged at trunk call rates, which were costing us a fortune.

“I would estimate that we have saved somewhere between $4000 and $5000 a month just in call costs with this new system,” Dawes added. A further reduction in maintenance, support costs and carrier expenses are other early benefits of the implementation, he said.

Other features

New applications, such as the call centre application, VoIP networking to remote showrooms, Avaya Voicemail Pro and wireless IP handsets in the factory had also greatly increased functionality to Accent Blinds’ staff and their ability to quickly respond to customer needs.

“All our calls are fully networked. A call made in Melbourne can be automatically routed to the showroom in Newcastle, where the customer gets picked up immediately,” Dawes said.

In relation to the call centre application, Milton-White said Accent customers were also benefiting greatly from a reduction in response times from an average of 90 seconds to merely 15 seconds.

“It can now handle all incoming calls, transferring them to operators within a couple of seconds, whilst providing detailed reports about customers and providing feedback about company advertising,” he said.

Another important function was the “wall board”, which allows agents to see the number of calls waiting to be answered, where they’re coming from and when they can be answered.

The solution also enables call monitoring and reporting allowing Accent Blinds’ call centre management to monitor efficiency and design work practices accordingly.

“We are pleased to acknowledge the Avaya IP Office has significantly improved the way we do business. Because we were growing from a smaller to medium sized business, we haven’t looked back - this system is designed to scale to our needs,” Dawes said.

In addition, Accent Blinds can now handle its rapid growth and peaks in business. “We are on a growth trajectory and recently opened a new showroom in Melbourne.

While our staff in the Melbourne branch can focus primarily on handling face-to-face customer interactions, spikes in incoming calls to the showroom can be re-directed to our experienced Sydney call centre operators via VoIP technology giving us the flexibility and business agility to respond to customer needs by utilising all available resources,” Dawes said.

Dawes added that Accent hadn’t as yet fully integrated all the features into their system such as call back, call prompts and the caller ID function, which fully integrates and brings customers up onto the screen.

“We have an ongoing relationship with Planet, this system is still a work in progress and there are still so many things that we can do to make our business even more efficient,” he said.

“We are also planning to log a number of other CRM features as well as mobile cards, though we are still in the process of evaluating what we actually need,” Dawes said.