Amillan

About Trent & Dove Housing

Trent & Dove Housing offers well maintained, affordable homes across East Staffordshire, South Derbyshire and North West Leicestershire. This includes 6,000 properties, ranging from sheltered accommodation to family homes and everything in between.

Trent & Dove housing are driven to make a difference in people’s lives and reduce homelessness in the region. Their aspiration is to be an organisation of over 10,000 homes by 2022. By providing affordable homes and a wide range of supporting services they enable people and communities to thrive and enjoy life.

The housing association identified a need for improved reporting from its telephony system to ensure the organisation delivers the services that it offers to its clients. This included peak-time staffing of phones, extended service hours, outbound calling and ‘first point of contact’ resolution. In addition, a new LAN solution was required by Trent & Dove Housing, to both support the communication solution and protect against system failures that would result in SLA failures for the housing association.

The Solution

Amillan implemented Unified Communications and Contact Centre platform with a total of 213 users and 20 contact centre agents, and a replacement LAN solution to support it. The Unified Communications solution provides a call distribution system operating across all sites by routing calls to the first available qualified staff member in the shortest time.

Amillan also replaced Trent & Dove Housing’s multiple telephony systems with a single solution distributed across all sites, which provided a platform to support hot-desking, home working, remote contact centre agents, audio and video conferencing. The solution also gave the housing association a single, centralised management system for their communication platform.

The LAN solution provided abundant network bandwidth for voice, data and UC, with the additional requirement to support video over IP. Amillan designed and implemented a network that is resilient so in the event of an appliance failure, the fibre route will be maintained, and Trent & Dove Housing’s SLAs will not be affected.

After just three months of the system going live, Trent & Dove Housing reported a 50% reduction in time taken to answer calls; from 45 seconds to just 22 seconds. In addition, the average call length was reduced by 25%, helping Trent & Dove achieve their objective of faster call resolution. This improvement in answering time also reduced the abandoned call rate from 25% previously, to 8% on the new solution.

Amillan’s solution also provided a reduction in costs for Trent & Dove Housing. With the single system replacing multiple legacy systems, the ongoing maintenance costs were greatly reduced. The rationalised solution provided Trent & Dove Housing with a central management system which reduced operational costs and simplified the administration of the communications system.

“We selected Amillan’s solution on the basis of the wealth of features the solution provides, which we felt would increase our levels of customer service and boost the productivity of our staff.”

About Halfords

Halfords is the UK’s leading retailer in car maintenance, car enhancement and leisure, including cycles, accessories and outdoor leisure equipment. It differentiates itself through its national store portfolio, a broad range of products, competitive pricing, a fitting service for products sold, customer service and a strong brand. There are also over 460 stores across the UK with a number of sites also extending across Europe.

Halfords were undertaking a store refurbishment program to keep stores looking fresh and modern and to help attract new customers from the growing number of car and cycle enthusiasts.

Halfords wanted to replace telephone systems with a single vendor solution for all refurbished stores whilst maintaining the systems of older stores. A secure broadband connection was required in all stores was also required to manage energy systems, in order to reduce running costs and make stores more economical.

The Solution

Amillan provided a range of solutions and services to Halfords to address the communications and infrastructure challenges in the business.

As stores were refurbished, Amillan implemented the latest in IP telephony to replace existing systems, standardising them across the UK. This allowed stores to be more easily managed and administrate centrally.

In addition to this, Amillan also installed broadband at 80 sites to support Halfords’ energy management system. Providing the full range of communications and infrastructure allowed Amillan to help Halfords make the full use of their technology.

To ensure Halfords with the piece of mind that systems would continue to work smoothly, Amillan also provided maintenance for all telephone systems. This was made possible by Amillan’s high level of skills and expertise of its engineers.

“Our relationship with Amillan has allowed us to make a gradual migration to new telephony solutions while protecting our investment in existing systems. We work in true partnership and Amillan take a proactive approach in our business, suggesting ways in which we can enhance our performance with better communications.”

About James Cropper

James Cropper is a world-class advanced materials and paper products group, with an operational reach in over 50 countries. Using materials from cotton and wood to carbon fibre they support industries from packaging to digital imaging and aerospace with products that are at the cutting edge of performance.

The business is renowned globally for its dedicated responses to custom projects and its award-winning commitment to the highest standards of sustainability.

The Project

James Cropper engaged Amillan to assist them in meeting several business objectives with a full upgrade of their corporate LAN and communications infrastructure.

During the pre-consultative excursive that Amillan carried out to design the best LAN solution for James Cropper, they mapped the wireless profile of the busy manufacturing site and developed a bespoke LAN & WLAN design that highlighted potential sources of interference.

In doing so, the deployed solution would then be able to prioritize important traffic and minimize latency for key applications, thus safeguarding core production activities.

In 2018 Amillan successfully implemented a new Alcatel-Lucent Data Networking solution at the main campus on time and within budget, subsequently moving on to support the expansion of the new LAN and WLAN out to remote sites across the world.

With their new robust LAN solution, James Cropper could also deploy Alcatel Lucent Enterprise’s OTNS to centrally monitor all alarms and trigger notifications, from multiple sources. This provided them with a critical health and safety function for all one workers across the site.

James Cropper are now capitalizing on their LAN networking investment as an enabler for business growth, with the procurement of more advanced manufacturing technology and introduction of unified communications lead smarter working initiatives.

About Futures Housing

Futures Housing Group is an innovative business which provides nearly 10,000 affordable homes throughout the East Midlands, owns a social enterprise, a commercial development company and co-owns a further education provider.

FHG provide more than 6,000 homes in Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire and more than 3,500 homes in Northamptonshire – but their ambitious business plan includes the development of more than 1,000 homes for rent, homes for sale, shared ownership and private-market rent by 2020.

Futures also provides excellent housing and support services for our customers and the local community.

The Project

As a forward-thinking organisation, Futures Housing Group was keen to implement a new communications environment that would not just allow all staff to benefit from cutting edge mobility, collaboration and flexible working capabilities, but also extend multimedia functionality externally to enable better engagement with its customers and partners.

The chosen solution of Microsoft Skype for Business, with integrated Enghouse EICC contact centre enables communication and productivity improvements throughout the organisation via voice, email, instant messaging, video and desktop sharing/collaboration. Customers now have greater choices in how they communicate with Futures Housing, including telephone, e-mail, SMS, live webchat and via social media, supporting the Group’s vision to allow its customers to help shape and develop their products and services.