CASE STUDY
Simplicity
Simplicity help recruitment businesses prosper and grow by providing a comprehensive range of funding, back office, and technology services.
Background
Simplicity employs circa 50 people and operate from an office in Gloucestershire. They help recruitment businesses prosper and grow by providing a comprehensive range of funding, back office, and technology services. And telephony is still an important method of how they communicate with their customers and suppliers.
A few years ago Simplicity decided to move to a VoIP (Voice over IP) cloud voice solution to help them work flexibly and to communicate and collaborate internally using a mixture of IP phones and applications on smartphones and laptops. A local reseller was appointed to deploy the solution, and this was when their problems began.
The challenge
From the outset the deployment was beset with problems relating to the project management and installation and number porting but eventually the solution went live and immediately the issues began to appear. The staff of Simplicity started to notice poor audio quality, volume levels and clipped calls, and the relevant apps would crash frequently.
The reseller initially suggested all the problems related to Simplicity’s internal network, computer hardware or internet bandwidth and asked Simplicity to do a large amount of evaluation and testing. All of this took time, and the various logs and traces were sent back to the reseller to forward to the vendor of the cloud voice solution. Many months passed and very little progress was made.
Ryan Russell, IT Manager of Simplicity, elaborates further “it was relentless. Every day there were complaints from staff and customers and each time we were made to feel it must be our infrastructure and it couldn’t possibly be the solution. At times logging internally 80 tickets a month from our own staff having issues. The reseller would ask us to try new settings or new firmware updates were released but very little improvement was seen, and it was clear that we were going round in circles. It was after several months of this we were introduced to Holler Technology by another business on the industrial estate who had a positive experience of working with Holler”.
The solution
Holler Technology have been supplying on-premises and cloud voice solutions for approaching 30 years and our knowledge is second-to-none. For businesses that require a feature-rich, scalable, and resilient fully cloud solution we launched Holler Voice in 2020. In a post-pandemic world it allows businesses to work flexibly and to communicate and collaborate with their staff no matter where they are based or on what device they’re working with.
Richard Burbage, CEO of Holler Technology, explains how we approached the Simplicity problems “when we were first introduced to Simplicity and met with them to understand their issues we felt their pain. They really had been given a hard time with their existing relationship and solution. We immediately assured them we would be able to address the problems but that we’d need to do a simple audit to ensure the existing infrastructure was not to blame. Simplicity agreed to allow this and to also move to a proof of concept involving a small number of users to prove beyond doubt the quality and reliability of the Holler Voice solution.”
Ryan Russell from Simplicity picks up the story “of course we were wary. We’d been given assurances before from the incumbent supplier and our confidence was low but very soon it was immediately apparent that Holler was a business who genuinely knew their trade. For weeks we’d been trying to get a Yealink SIP conference phone working with on the existing solution to no avail and Holler took one look at it and had it up and running in a matter of minutes. It was clear these guys knew what they were doing but now we needed to make sure their solution was fit-for-purpose and addressed our needs in terms of functionality”.
Richard Burbage from Holler goes on to explain “for several weeks we loaned Simplicity licences and hardware and they immediately saw the improvement in terms of audio quality, resilience and functionality as we had apps for Windows, Mac, iOS and Android and even a WebRTC soft phone for browser-based communication. I’m pleased to say that confidence did return for Simplicity and I believe they feel in Holler they found a solution and supplier that exceeded their expectations.”
A few months after the initial deployment Simplicity went on to add the CallSwitch Contact Centre functionality to the solution to aid management of their team and ensure customer KPIs were being met. Ryan Russell went on to say “Holler were very patient and professional in sitting with all the stakeholders to ensure our their requirements were met. We then tested the system for a few weeks before committing to it and I’m pleased to say it’s been well received all round”.
Our Result
Knowledge is power and no more so than having the data to know how your reacting and responding to your clients. Simplicity now have the right cloud voice solution to make them more agile and flexible when communicating with customers but also the data they need to know how to plan staff rosters and predict the peaks and troughs during the day. Partnering with Holler Technology have given Simplicity a competitive edge.
