Smiles on dials as UC solution answers call

Harcourts Blue Realty has carved out a solid bit of territory in Brisbane's eastern suburbs in recent years, to the point where its communications system began to give it growing pains.

Its 30-user Panasonic telephone system was inflicting high costs and limited capacity. Monthly call charges were increasing, and rates were dictated by the carrier, AAPT, taking cost control out of the estate agent's hands.

There were also growing add-on charges and the ''hidden'' costs of mobile phone call-ins. Landlines were not being used for call routing, and there were high call-back charges, and missed calls.

And then there were high costs of maintenance and service each time a person needed to be added or removed from the system.

Harcourts Blue Realty customer service manager, Gerry Gorry, was increasingly frustrated with the costs and inability of the Panasonic system to create any sort of scale going forward.

"The big issue was that we had no insight into what was happening with our calls," he says.

"We realised we were wasting money with staff calling each other within the branches using the traditional telephone, but we had no way of knowing how, where and what to rein in. This was having a severe impact on our ability to plan for growth."

The lack of a telephony system across the company's three branches had promoted something of a silo mentality, which meant staff did not feel connected and part of a team.

Following discussions with telephony advisers ITT Communications, and after testing various technologies, the real estate management decided a reliable and scalable unified communications (UC) solution would be the best option to replace the system that was coming to the end of a five-year lease.

"We needed to reduce our call costs and provide our sales and support staff with a resource to help them be more productive," says Gorry.

"We had to find a way to help our staff communicate more effectively.

"Ease-of-use was another issue. Staff found the current features awkward, not at all intuitive and not linked in any way to our computer resources.

"As a result, the system was only being used for basic telephony. Training people on the Panasonic system for simple tasks, such as transferring calls, voicemail, and remotely accessing calls, was extremely time-consuming."

With the contract termination date pending, Gorry had an opportunity to take on a new supplier that provided immediate savings in call costs, reduce basic maintenance expenses, and includes additional resources that could lift productivity.

As Harcourts Blue Realty operations grew, the system needed to be easy to manage and use, efficient to deploy, and highly scalable, providing free calls between branch offices.

After evaluating the available options and examining various demonstrations, the real estate agents selected a ShoreTel UC system comprising ShoreGear 40 and ShoreGear 90 BRI switches and 61 ShorePhone IP 560 and IP 212 telephones.

It also included ShoreWare Personal Call Manager and extension and mailbox applications.

Two ShoreTel branch office solutions (comprising DVS licences, site licences and server) were included in the deployment to maximise the efficiency of the call centre and reception desk.

"Our sales people found the ShoreWare Call Manager feature a genuine resource that helped them achieve more from their work day," says Gorry.

ShoreWare Call Manager provides information about incoming calls and call history, so users can access a variety of details about the caller before taking the call.

Users could also type in a call recipient's name and make the call using a desktop computer without picking up the handset.

ShoreTel simplified the system management by allowing them to access the UC system using a browser-based administration interface, ShoreWare Director, from anywhere on the network.

ShoreWare Director is a web-based network management tool that provides a single management interface for all Harcourts Blue Realty's communications applications.

It recognises active IP telephones on the network, and eliminates manual processes by configuring applications so new users are automatically assigned an extension, mailbox,

and auto-attendant profile when they first access their voicemail, and can then be added to an Automatic Call Distribution (ACD) group.