Case Study: Family Support Charity

About The Customer

This Lincolnshire based provider of charitable support for families modernised its various telephone and conferencing communication systems to provide more flexibility for its employees and volunteers whilst reducing costs. The organisation deployed VIA Voice so staff can stay better connected when working from their various

office locations, at home, or when out on home visits with the local families they support.

The Challenge

Driven by a business need to reduce costs, the customer decided to cut its portfolio of offices down from nine to four. As a result, the charity wanted to ensure that staff could work remotely, but remain easily connected to each other and have seamless telephone system capabilities regardless of location. In addition, the customer also wanted to reduce the time and costs of having to operate and manage many different fixed telephone systems.

The Solution 

As part of an IT Transformation project, which included migrating to Microsoft Office 365, the charity chose to replace all separate legacy telephone (PBX) systems with TeamsLink, the cloud-based Microsoft Teams UC solution which seamlessly integrates with Office 365.

The TeamsLink solution operates securely over the Internet with all communications encrypted end-to-end, therefore protecting sensitive information. It allows employees

to freely talk, Instant Message (IM), audio/video chat and email across a variety of devices, such as PCs, laptops, tablets and smartphones.

As a part of the agreement with Wavenet, staff can make calls to UK landline telephone numbers free of charge, helping to reduce annual operating expenses and provide certainty when budgeting. TeamsLink’s conferencing facility enables staff to setup and host audio and video conference calls with both internal staff and external third parties for free.

The charity also has access to the TeamsLink Portal, which enables customers to

simply setup and manage unlimited inbound telephone call flow routes which includes time-of-day routing, Auto Attendant, touchtone interactive Voice Response (IVR) messages, department ring groups and group voicemail. These capabilities ensure inbound telephone calls to the charity are directed and handled in the most efficient and effective way.

"Replacing our separate conventional telephony and audio conferencing systems with TeamsLink has helped us to boost workforce collaboration and productivity, which is extremely important when providing services to those in need. The new platform gives our employees more freedom and flexibility, whilst also helping us to make significant cost savings."

With Skype for Business set to retire on July 31st 2021 businesses will now look to make the migration to Microsoft Teams.

This upgrade also gives them the ability to utilise TeamsLink and create a true Unified Communication platform that allows easy collaboration and communication across organisations of all sizes.