QLD resort discovers VoIP

AFTER DISCOVERING 3664 calls were missed over a three-month period, Tangalooma Wild Dolphin Resort, located off the Brisbane coast, decided it was time to trade in its 20-year-old phone system for an IP telephony system.

Previously, the resort, where guests can handfeed a pod of wild bottlenose dolphins, had operated a simple telephone key system that could not transfer calls and had no reporting or call centre functionality. Tangalooma recognised it needed to upgrade its communications infrastructure to introduce a telephony system that was feature-rich, future proof, scaleable and affordable in the competitive tourism and hospitality industry.

Geoff Breene, Tangalooma’s administration, finance and IT director said the resort was forced to “face the music” when its Fujitsu/Commander phone system, implemented in 1987 was no longer able to handle the growing popularity of the resort.

“Back then our phone system was leading edge. But through the years we had trouble getting support for it. As we grew we ran out of handsets and had to mix and match. In the end our technical people couldn’t do anything with it,” he said.

According to Breene, the resort operates on two locations — the head office is located in Brisbane and the resort is located on
Moreton Island.

“At the time we were in the process of moving the head office to the mainland because the actual office was becoming too small and couldn’t accommodate our growth. We were actually going to wait until we moved to implement a new phone system,” said Breene.

Not according to plan
However, things didn’t turn out as Tangalooma had planned — when the resort undertook an audit it discovered it was losing more than 3000 phone calls, translating to potentially lost revenue. Breene then had the ammunition he needed to convince the heads of the resort that a phone system was needed before the move to a new location.

According to Breene, he had been looking into phone systems for quite a while for the resort and had investigated a few systems.

Tangalooma was in business with its previous phone people for about 15 years. The resort turned to these guys a few years after it had bought the Fujitsu phone system and Telstra had stopped supplying support for it.

“The reseller we were working with showed us a NEC PABX that was a non-VoIP system and I didn’t see the value in it,” he said.

Breene had been researching VoIP phone systems for around eight years and knew the value of having such a system, especially when it came time to moving offices.

Money not the issue
Telstra Business Systems, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Telstra and an Avaya Gold business partner, had approached Tangalooma with an Avaya IP telephony system. Two things convinced Breene of the value in the technology.

“Price wasn’t an issue, we did some haggling over it. The call centre feature Avaya offered was fundamentally better. The ability to provide one phone number for the office on the mainland and the resort was the other,” said Breene.

He also said this was one of the most significant technological innovations that Tangalooma had ever undertaken.

“Avaya and Telstra were

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