ESSENTIAL RECRUITMENT BENEFIT FROM 3CX PHONE SYSTEM
3CX is an ideal solution for businesses with multiple offices or when they need employees to work from home. With a list of features rivalling most enterprise grade systems, it can provide a flexible and cost effective solution to any business looking to upgrade their phones.
Essential Recruitment have seen impressive, continued growth since they initially opened their first two branches in Mansfield and Ripley back in 2006.
Now with offices in 8 locations throughout the Midlands and South Yorkshire, they have become a trusted source of temporary and permanent employees for businesses across several sizes and sectors in the UK. From Cleaner to Cad Design Engineer or Order Picker to Operations Manager, they have a solution for every recruitment challenge.
Like Reformed IT, Essential take huge pride in their service delivery and hold themselves to incredibly high standards.
If your business has any recruitment needs, you can find out more about Essential Recruitment on their website.
The Challenge
With multiple offices spread across various locations, Essential Recruitment had already invested in several standalone phone systems for each location a few years ago. One of the major issues with having independent systems at each office is the inability to have direct, extension to extension transfers between people at different offices. This led to clients and candidates having to hang up and call back a different number if they were more suited to speak with someone at a different branch. Obviously with service one of the top priorities, this wasn’t ideal.
Because each branch was using either ISDN or PSTN services which provide physical telephone lines into each building, this also restricted the ability to route calls dynamically and intelligently across various locations. It also meant that multiple lines were being paid for monthly at every office despite the fact that many of the lines would continually be unused. This reduced efficiency and increased actual costs to the business.
Also, with BT set to switch off the legacy telephone networks, ISDN & PSTN in less than 5 years, the senior management team knew that a switch to a VoIP based service would be required at some stage in the near future.
Speaking to Reformed IT, they were offered a solution which would not only deal with all of their identified challenges but also provide benefits they’d not even thought about.
The Solution
When discussing the requirements with Essential Recruitment, Reformed IT knew that 3CX would be a perfect fit for their needs. Not only would it provide centralisation of the user extensions across all branches in one, cloud hosted phone system, it would also provide a list of other features which have become necessary in modern businesses.
Because it would be a big change to the business, Reformed IT offered a completely free trial of the 3CX solution to be tested at one of the Essential branches. This allowed for a comprehensive review of the quality, functionality and features of the phone system without the need to commit to an order or any long term contract usually associated with phone lines and systems.
Following a successful trial, where a branch used their own mobiles as their business extension over a period of one month, they were happy to discuss the commercials for rolling out the 3CX solution across the entire group of offices.
Shocked by the total cost of the solution versus their current phone bills, Carl Wootton said “I’ve had a look at the quote, I’ve got to be honest, it looks too cheap, which worries me.”
Assured that there had been no mistake on the quote and that the reason for the significant savings was simply due to how cost efficient the new system would be versus their legacy phone lines and dedicated systems at each branch, Essential agreed to begin rolling out 3CX, branch by branch to all the offices.
Reformed IT then handled everything in dealing with the migration from old to new. This included the supply of 3CX, the cloud hosting, physical desk phones at the various offices, the mobile app installations, the new SIP telephone lines and the porting (transfer) of all existing telephone numbers to Reformed IT.
Office by office, the 3CX Advanced Certified engineers at Reformed IT set up all users and deployed the desk phones, providing dedicated training and guidance on how to use the new system.
The Outcome
Calls between people at different branches now couldn’t be easier. A simple application or web portal gives a quick visual dashboard showing everyone in the business and the status of their phone, whether busy, engaged or available. If a client or candidate now calls one of their offices, it is a simple process to transfer them to the right person, regardless of where they are.
With the increase in people working from home, particularly if they need to self-isolate due to Covid-19, 3CX gives a simple way for anyone to take calls from anywhere. With mobile apps on iOS and Android, users are able to take their extension with them, wherever they go. Even without a mobile, people have the option to log into their extension using a web browser and take calls from any laptop/computer, anywhere in the world using a headset.
Because the systems have been centralised and cloud hosted, Essential have seen a dramatic cost saving, in this particular case saving over £500 per month on telephone expenses. The cloud hosted system also means that a power failure at any office doesn’t take the calls out of action as they can be easily taken using the mobile apps.
The added benefit of having call overflow between different offices means that calls will always be answered by a person and not put through to a voicemail service if one branch is busy at the time of the call.
To top it all off, a call reporting and wallboard service has been integrated to provide the very best analytics and intelligence on call flow and volume to the senior management team allowing for better business decisions on resourcing.
Here are some of the other features available now to Essential Recruitment using 3CX:
- Voicemail to email
- Auto attendant (Press 1 for Support, 2 for accounts)
- Call recording
- CRM integration
- Call queuing and automatic callback
- Time scheduled call flows
- Automatic holiday call re-routing
- Hot desking
- Barge, listen in and whisper for training
- Lots more
If you would like to know more about how Reformed IT & 3CX can help your business to communicate effectively from anywhere then please get in touch with the team today on 01158 244824.
Dealing with a new supplier can sometimes be time consuming and does come with its challenges. I can honestly say that working with Reformed IT has been an absolute pleasure, Joe and his team should be really proud of the service which they provide.
It’s fair to say that our telephone system was tired and outdated and wasn’t able to adapt to our current requirements. The thought of making the change to the 3CX VOIP system was worrying due the perceived disruption I thought it may cause. Reformed IT have made the transition seamless, Joe offers advice during the process and his communication is superb. Along with this we have also been able to make significant cost savings. It goes without saying that I would recommend Reformed IT and I look forward to working with them in future.