CPN scores a hole in one for specialist golf retailers American Golf
American Golf are Europe’s largest golf retailer. They have 106 stores in the UK and Republic of Ireland and are still growing! They have stores all over the UK along with the ability to purchase from them via the website. The company turnover is more than £113 million a year.
The high street retailer stocks a full range of equipment for golfers of all levels and offers advice from their experts both in-store and online to help with customer queries.
They have various sites and employ between 800 and 900 staff. We found out that cost, reliability and flexibility were their biggest challenges.
The Benefits
- Lower voice and data costs.
- Improved ease of business operation.
- Reduced business risks.
- Improved productivity.
- Increased communication between sites.
- Better protection against cyber threats.
- Flexible commercial options.
- Network monitoring and management capability.
- The ability to prioritise important business applications.
- Scalable band width.
- Improved customer experience.
The Challenge
Prior to becoming a Gamma customer, American Golf had a traditional ISDN legacy solution through a different provider. This limited their flexibility and was presenting issues with reliability and account management.
As a fast-paced business, American Golf found that when they needed to react quickly to any unplanned downtime or other network issues, they weren’t able.
Another issue they faced was that many of their sites were in ‘green-grass’ locations as opposed to cities or town centres. This caused various issues with network coverage, connecting one of their sites to another, and prevented them from reacting promptly.
The Solution
Managing a large retail store network with a very small team across various sites was a struggle for American Golf. As a lot of their sites are well outside of city centre locations, connectivity was a major issue.
The company also needed improved business continuity and flexibility and so were struggling to react quickly in the event of any issues.
Having an existing relationship with Gamma, from a previous upgrade where we provided an inbound call management platform, it made sense to contact us to help with the connectivity issues they were experiencing across their various ‘green-grass’ locations.
In view of this, having resolved the voice issues, the next step was to work with the company to address how it was managing its data. On review our recommendation was to consider our MPLS based WAN solution – Converged Private Networks (CPN).
We converged their voice and data on to a single platform. This easy-to-manage solution provides strong connectivity and enables them to access business critical applications across multiple sites.
CPN has ultimately improved the customers internal communications, providing them with more flexibility and above all is helping them to achieve substantial cost savings.
