Established in 1982, Smiths Gloucester Ltd has grown from a single owner-operated Plant Hire company to one of the largest Construction and Waste Management companies in the South West, offering services including: Skip Hire, Demolition, Construction and Waste Management The multifaceted group, with a Head Office in Eastington, satellite offices in Moreton Valence, Tewkesbury, Avonmouth and South Wales, keeps its family values firmly at the heart of each project undertaken

Requirement:

Smiths needed to connect all five of their sites and give the branch offices access to the same information and systems as their head office. They wanted a centralised reception for the whole group, using their main number in all their key marketing, as well as integration with mobiles to give their sales and logistics teams seamless connectivity with their offices.

They were also seeking to reduce their telecoms costs by merging contracts for each separate site onto a single contract. Loss of service was becoming an issue for their service team and they also wanted to track call statistics to inform their telesales and customer service strategies.

Solution:

Lister Unified Communications evaluated all of Smiths requirements and designed a solution to meet their needs while reducing their telecoms costs.

We installed an Avaya IP Office Multi-site Phone System to link all the sites together and give total integration across all sites and users. We improved stability with mirrored systems at Eastington and Tewkesbury. Recent upgrades have seen the addition of SIP trunks to reduce costs and improve business continuity by integrating mobiles. Chronicall software provides live call statistics, giving Smiths a wealth of data they can use to monitor and improve their internal and external communications, such as call length and how long before phones are answered.

Outcomes:

Smiths now have a robust and future-proof telecoms system that allows them to use one inbound number for all of their five sites, providing a simpler customer experience as well as a more efficient internal communications system, with free calls between sites. The centralised reception, with visibility of all branches, has led to improved customer service through quicker response and more efficient call handling. Smiths has seen a marked reduction in their costs as well as huge improvements in call quality, system stability and efficiency for their staff.

Alan Smith, MD commented:

“We are proud to say the we have been delivering service excellence for 34 years and it’s great to work with a company like Lister Unified Communications that has the same ethos. All of our people work incredibly hard, but were being let down by our old communications system. The new system has made a real difference to both staff and customers.”

‍