The company provides a makeover and photo shoot experience to over 7,000 clients a month and was looking to reduce both its telecommunications and other operating costs by replacing its old phone system with a converged software based solution that could take advantage of SIP and GSM gateways. The company expects a return on investment within 6 months and annual savings of over £100,000.
Managing Director at Doubletake, Julian Jenkins explains, “All of our business is generated by referrals from existing clients, so a large part of our operation is involved in outbound calling. We employee 100 agents to contact prospects by phone and the majority of these calls are made to mobiles, making telephony costs a significant part of our overheads. Our incumbent system was unreliable, expensive and was unable to give us the additional functionality that we were looking for.”
After reviewing a number of potential replacements, the company was introduced to Swyx, by one of its Gold partners, GP Network Solutions (GPNS), a specialist in unified communications. Julian added, “The Swyx solution had a number of key advantages over other systems we considered, foremost of which was its ability to run on our existing data network and importantly it had the capability to route calls directly to the most appropriate network; GSM for mobiles or SIP for non-mobile calls.”
Jenkins continues, “The Swyx solution also offered key features such as call recording, voicemail management using email, and full integration with contact management systems such as Microsoft Outlook, included as standard, making it a very cost effective package”.
Jenkins has also been very impressed with the level of service he has received from GPNS, “The support has been excellent, they thoroughly understand our business model and have customised the solution to work hard for us.”
The company has ambitions to increase its customer volume to 9,000 per month and extend its operation overseas initially to India and Hong Kong where it will roll out Swyx. Jenkins adds, “The advantage of using a system like Swyx is that it is easy and quick to set up and of course all the calls between offices are free. In addition we are already using Swyx’s built-in conferencing facility between our UK studios and we will extend this further once we go international.”