Brown Brothers succeeds with VoIP

Brown says there were few hiccups during the VoIP project. He had planned to use some softphones, but “due to the discovery of a bug between the voicemail software and the softwarephones, we went with hard handsets, which were more expensive,” he says.

Brown says another potential challenge comes from when you have a number of different parties involved in the one project.

“The voicemail comes from one party, the handsets from another, and the servers from another. There needs to be some clarity and confidence that they’re all going to work together and that one person is going to take the responsibility for them all,” he says.

One of the traditional fears and realities of integration projects is that technology vendors can end up pointing fingers at each other if there is a stuff-up, and the buyer ends up being stuck in the middle. Brown says he was fortunate to deal with the one person throughout the implementation.


Benefits

Brown Brothers receives a lot of orders for its wine via its call centre, from all over Australia and internationally. One of the problems with the old PABX was the company had very limited capacity to measure and monitor call quality and handling of those calls.

“The call centre was such a critical part of their business. They wanted to be able to obtain metrics from the call centre to make sure they were meeting customers’ requirements, and if not, how to improve them. The new VoIP system enabled that function,” says Campbell.

Brown Brothers was able to put funds saved by deploying VoIP towards a WAN, which the winery did not have before.

"We put in a voicemail system for the first time in the company. Also because of the infrastructure we were running, it integrated fully with Microsoft Outlook.
We’ve been using Outlook very heavily throughout our business for email, publishing calendars, scheduling meetings and other workflow aspects,” says Brown. Not only does this improve productivity, it ultimately improves endcustomer satisfaction.

At the time of installation, one of the differences between the solutions Brown reviewed was the compression technology. “Although more expensive from a capital point of view, we got significant running cost advantages because it was superior compression technology,” he says.


On completion
 
The feedback from users of the new VoIP system was that it was easy to use. Brown says there was not much resistance in terms of adoption. IBM puts that down to good user training and the management of expectations.

Brown agrees. “When people get a new technology of any kind, they’ve got this funny habit of assuming that it’s going to fix all their problems -- whether technology-related or not.”

“Part of it is getting real about expectations upfront, because when people have surprises in a project, they get grumpy about it. Make it clear what this [new technology] can and can’t do, and what responsibilities actually lie with the end user to make it work for them,” he says.

Brown’s last word: “You never know what your business is going to do and you never know exactly which way you’re going forward, so you need to be building the base architecture of your IT systems so you’ve got options going forward.”

“A technology like VoIP gives you considerable options and that increases the agility of your business and the ability to respond to changing business needs down the track.” 

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