Horizon provides the personal touch

Established in 1946, Kings and Barnhams provide electrical services, security and fire protection services, automation services and retail electrical goods. Kings & Barnhams will deliver honest and trusted advice, combined with their trademark outstanding service.

Kings & Barnhams is an independent, family owned business delivering a personal service to our clients throughout East Anglia and the UK.

They also provide after sales support and engineering response 24/7. Their longevity as a business has been built by ensuring that they provide a personal service to their clients.

 

The Beneficial Features

  • Gamma Horizon
  • Managed Voice Connectivity
  • Horizon Auto Attendant
  • Cloud Call Queue
  • Horizon mobile twinning
  • Horizon mobile app
  • Corporate Directory
  • Horizon Integrator
  • Voicemail to email Unified Messaging
  • Polycom VVX411 HD Handsets

The Challenge

Based over three sites covering East Anglia and providing a wide range of services they needed a solution that would enable their customers to contact the correct staff quickly and efficiently.

Their premises based telephone system had been set up with a complex call routing plan that often resulted in callers not speaking to the correct department.

To compound the problem Kings and Barnhams were not able to make changes to the system operation themselves. This resulted in a request being made to their support company. When the changes were eventually made this often resulted in further problems being created due to the complexity of the call routing. The system was struggling to cope with the demands of the business.

The company required a new solution that was more suited to the way their business functioned allowing clients to be answered with the personal service Kings and Barnhams’ prided themselves on.

The Solution

Following on-line research they decided to engage with Eastern Voice & Data and asked them to suggest a solution to their problems.

Eastern Voice & Data undertook a survey of the business’s requirement and listened to the issues that the staff were experiencing.

After having looked in detail at the way the previous telephone system was operating Eastern Voice & Data recommended that the correct way forward was to implement Horizon, a fully cloud based telephony solution.

There were a number of reasons this was suggested: All three geographically split offices could be integrated fully into the same solution with a shared auto-attendant allowing calls to be routed correctly. Calls would be easily transferable between offices.

Horizon has a customer accessible portal that would allow Kings and Barnhams’ staff to be fully involved in the system setup and ongoing operation. Once the initial set up was completed by the engineering staff at Eastern Voice & Data, Kings and Barnhams were able to take control of their telephone system – a far cry from their previous arrangements!

Solutions To Unidentified Problems

Kings and Barnhams offer 24/7 support contact for clients. By utilising the auto-attendant function of Horizon we were able to streamline and automate the ability for customers to request this service.

During extremely busy periods customers could leave a voicemail requesting a call back. The voicemail was delivered as an email attachment to the relevant staff ensuring that a call back was never missed. This provided Unified Messaging for staff, allowing information and requests from clients to be directed to the right people within the organisation.

Cloud call queuing was also implemented for the busy appointments line ensuring that calls were answered in sequence, promptly.

Horizon is able to twin a desk phone with a mobile phone allowing both to ring simultaneously. This provides a high degree of flexibility for staff who are on the move and is directly controllable from the Horizon desk top user portal.

The senior management at Kings & Barnhams elected to use the Horizon Mobile App, effectively turning their mobile into a direct extension from Horizon. This allowed them to work from any location and improved the staff and client accessibility to senior management.

Over 6,000 telephone numbers were stored into the new system allowing incoming callers to be identified by their name. This corporate directory allowed staff to locate contacts quickly and easily. This was also combined with the provision of Horizon Integrator for all staff enabling them to control telephony functions from their PC desktop. This provided click to dial from screen and the ability to ‘screen pop’ Outlook contacts directly to the PC. This also meant that the company was in a position to move to an integrated CRM package allowing customer details to be ‘popped’ directly onto the screen.

6000

Telephone Numbers Stored

The Results

Eastern Voice & Data recommended the installation of converged fibre connections allowing both voice and data to share the same data connection in a fully managed set up. This enabled legacy telephone lines to be disposed of and importantly direct dial numbers were allocated to staff and departments to further improve the flow of incoming calls.

High definition Polycom VVX handsets improved the quality of phone calls with HD voice quality being provided as a standard feature of Horizon. This was allied to wireless headsets allowing staff to be mobile within the office environment.

The move to Horizon and cloud based technology enabled Kings & Barnhams to improve the telephony experience of their clients but also allowed them to improve their overall operation.

Significantly they had also put in place a telephony solution that not only had solved a business issue but could also adjust to their changing business needs quickly and efficiently. It put Kings and Barnhams back in control of their telephony.