When national fashion retailer City Beach wanted to get off its legacy telecoms provided by Telstra, it opted for an end-to-end Avaya solution provided by CTI and hosted by Macquarie Telecom.
The project, worth more than $300,000, spanned the Avaya stack, from the new Server Edition of Avaya IP Office to a contact centre solution, in-house cellular communications, $80,000 worth of power-over-ethernet switches and around 300 top-of-the-line Avaya 9608 IP deskphones.
The deployment has been rolling for almost a year, picking up a global ‘Mid Market Innovation Award’ from Avaya along the way. CRN sat down with City Beach CIO Rhian Greenway and CTI’s Steve Herz for a deep dive into the project.
Tell us about the business drivers behind the project?
Rhian Greenway We were into a long tenure with Telstra and were discontent with the service for a number of reasons, including a history of excessive overbilling to the tune of almost a quarter of a million dollars at one point. I was looking for a more viable long-term alternative. CustomNet [Telstra’s Spectrum service] is slowly on its way out.
We wanted to get off that as quick as we could and move to something we had a bit more control over. Cost reduction is probably the biggest factor.
What was your IT and communications posture?
Rhian We had primarily Telstra across the retail network. It had worked well. At the warehouse, we had a mixture of a legacy Ericsson system, which had been in play for close to 12 years, and a small NEC system that we implemented as part of our online rollout five years ago. The goal was to get one platform across all facets of the business that we could expand.
Why move now?
Rhian We were finally out of contract with Telstra. Given the climate at the moment, everyone’s trying to save a few dollars, so it had a little more interest to the owners [of City Beach]. The Macquarie-CTI solution provided some decent, off-the-bat cost savings.
What does Macquarie provide?
Rhian It was whole of business – they have our mobiles, our data network, our hosting. We had planned that long term, we’d move the fixed line network over to those guys as well.
Brennan IT was our previous provider and to say that was a fairly rocky ship towards the end would be an understatement. Macquarie had been courting our business for a while and came up with an offer that was cheaper than Brennan’s and provided us with a good platform to grow.
How did you come across CTI?
Rhian Macquarie had provided a couple of different vendors. We already had experience with one of them and we weren’t particularly impressed. After a couple of meetings with Steve and the CTI team, the solution looked good and they are just an easy team to work with as well. We’re a difficult business in the best of times – very demanding. It’s good to find a partner that can work with that.
Steve Herz I haven’t found them to be difficult to work with at all.
Steve, what’s your experience with these kinds of deployments?
Steve I’ve been involved with Avaya IP Office for 15 years. It expanded into what is called the Server Edition [for virtual environments] to address the midmarket.
What is it about this product that makes it a better fit for the midmarket?
Steve It just fits a piece of the puzzle, with your single SIP trunk connection to provide supply of carriage, your basic IP end point, and then you have a lot of functionality built around that. It’s very specific to a user; each user type can be catered for, from a receptionist to a contact agent to a DECT mobile user to a straight handset in the store. The product also works with legacy equipment better than a lot of other products do. It’s not a pure IP play.
Why did City Beach choose Avaya?
Rhian I didn’t have a lot of experience with Avaya prior to the deployment. I’ve done a lot of work with Cisco in a role prior to City Beach and I’ve always had a bit of a soft spot for it. Its CallManager tool is great, it’s easy to use and quite easy to train people in.
One of our key needs was to have a platform that we could maintain and manage in-house. Both the Ericsson and the NEC were both quite difficult to work with. After a proof of concept with [Avaya], it just hit the bill.
How much of CTI’s business is Avaya?
Steve Avaya would be 70 percent of our business. We’ve won awards with Avaya over the years. The last two years we’ve won international awards; one with City Beach and one prior to that for best technical implementation in Asia-Pacific. We have some clever engineers on board. Makes it easy for me to sell the solutions.
Having said that, we did want to run a proof of concept because we like to ensure the customer is happy with the product, and that the product works with the infrastructure. That was very important.
Rhian One of the more challenging things was the idea of running a VoIP platform over ADSL. Historically, that had been a bit of a barrier for us in looking at upgrading all those links in stores to fibre or ethernet. It’s quite expensive with 65 locations. Being able to run that over the existing ADSL infrastructure meant we could keep some of those other costs down.
How did you overcome that challenge of running voice over ADSL?
Steve It’s the ability of the network engineers to control the traffic and work with the customer to define rules on how data is used from the store to minimise the impact of the data on the voice bandwidth.
Rhian We’re not a very data-heavy business during the day, so that works well for us. DSL is getting to the point now where the connections are so cheap, the speeds are at 24MB down, it just works. You don’t get some of the more intricate QOS [quality of service] stuff that you would like to have on a voice network, but we found that hasn’t been too much of an issue.
In the head office and the warehouse, we do quality of service on all links to make sure that we can handle enough outbound calls. With the stores, we don’t have that control but it hasn’t proven to be an issue.
Were there any challenges with the store network being so geographically dispersed?
Rhian We have got two sites still running on 3G connections. They are running the voice platform over 3G, which is something we never thought we would be able to do.
Why are they on 3G rather than ADSL?
Rhian Lack of ports is the easiest way to explain it. DSL is so cheap and infrastructure in Queensland is probably lacking a little bit with some of the larger expansions taking place over the years. So places like Helensvale, Robina, up at North Lakes, there has been a lot of very quick expansion, residentially as well as commercially, which has put a lot of pressure on those services.
How does the City Beach project compare to other projects CTI has done?
Steve Each installation poses challenges. Some of the smaller businesses can be quite complex, in terms of computer-telephony integration and contact centre-type applications, but keeping it simple by rolling it out in a staged approach doesn’t impact business.
I want to give the Macquarie account manager a plug. His name is Joe Zillotti. He was key in managing the client expectations during the implementation stage, in particular network customisation and number porting management.
What was the timeline?
Steve We put in a proof of concept system around November, December last year. Then City Beach needed to cut over a couple of new stores in WA, so we ended up bringing them onto the proof-of-concept system and running that for a while to get these stores up and running.
Then we migrated that to the server platform, which is a primary and secondary server, so they’ve got full redundancy and resiliency.
Rhian It was luckily timed with opening a couple of new stores late last year in WA. We’re able to not only set up the new stores on the new platform, but also get WA cut over at the same time. That set us up well for rolling out the rest of the sites. We learned our lessons, we knew what we needed to do – whether that was switching infrastructure being under-specified, or other challenges with configuration. It allowed us to troubleshoot that while we had a couple of guys on the ground.
Who actually did the deployments at the locations across Australia?
Rhian The internal support staff took care of the rollout for most of the country. Anywhere we could fly into and get a decent amount of work done, we sent our own guys. We used a third party vendor for probably six or seven outlying stores.
We used those guys for sites where it wasn’t really economical for us to go, such as far north Queensland, Dandenong and Darwin. CTI helped out with a few of the Sydney stores further afield as well.
What was the most complicated part of the project?
Rhian Our distribution centre – which had the mix of NEC and Ericsson and was probably not the best configuration in the first place – was quite difficult to bring the IP office in and route that traffic. We spent a lot of time getting that right. That held us up a bit with some of the final stages of the call centre rollout. That was definitely the most complicated.
What is the new platform at the warehouse?
Steve It’s called IPOCC, for IP Office Contact Centre. It’s a multi-channel platform, which means voice, email, webchat, and it can integrate with social media platforms.
What are some of the benefits you’re seeing from the project?
Rhian Cost reduction is the number one. We’re looking around $10,000 a month off the bat, which is a good win.
What about functionality benefits?
Rhian Ease of management internally is a big one. As silly as it sounds, a phone name change should be a fairly simple kind of thing, but when you’re logging those requests with Telstra, it generates a bit of discontent in the business when you’ve got to wait four or five days to have someone’s name changed on their phone. Now we can log in and make those simple changes.Long term, mobility is probably the big win. You can work from home with an IP client as you would in the office.
How many people across the group touch the system?
Rhian There’s 110 of us at head office, there’s probably anywhere between 50 and 300 in the distribution centre, depending on the season, and then in the retail network there’s a couple of thousand people touching the technology on a daily basis – and again, that’s seasonal.
What have been some of the benefits for CTI?
Steve It has given us a really good reference customer within the retail vertical, but also it has given us some impetus to install our own gear as a hosted platform at Macquarie to serve Macquarie customers, with both enterprise and with IP Office technology. We’ve recently put in what’s called a Nutanix platform into Macquarie’s data centre.
Rhian That’s a fancy piece of gear.
Steve Apparently it’s the duck’s guts.
Does that mean that you can now offer the Avaya solution as a full managed service?
Steve That’s the intent of it. We’ve already cut over a couple of Sydney customers on to the new platform. It just gives us the ability to offer the full Avaya range of features and functionality for any clients in that mid-market and SME space.
And Rhian, any bonus benefits?
Rhian Winning an award and a trip to the States! You do these things to benefit the business, but it was recognised on a world stage. To say it was amazing is probably an understatement.
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