The Intamarket group has 4 national branches in South Africa with their head office located in Wynberg Johannesburg. The Group was looking for a way to firstly cut telephone costs and to allow branches to communicate with each other for free.
Quest’s initial task was to look at the group’s current telephone spend and telephone setup within each regional branch. We found that buy moving all the branches to a centrally managed and hosted setup, that there would be a substantial saving on National call costs between branches.
We then proposed that most staff would be able to have their internal extensions moved from a physical handset to an application on their smart phone. We would use a one desk phone as a reception console in each branch to handle incoming calls to the branch to be routed to the correct staff at the various branches. Wireless DECT phones would be given to internal sales staff for portability within their warehouses.
An additional challenge that we picked up at the branches that management were not aware of was the clients were calling the head office branch in Johannesburg looking to speak to staff in the remote regional offices. As their old solution did not cater for this option, they receptionist either had to give the client the correct number to call or in some cases when the call was answered staff did not have the regional number at hand. Quest solution allows any staff member to receive a call for any branch and merely transfer that call to the relevant person or branch. We also have setup branch failover systems so that should a branch be offline, their calls are routed to a free online branch so that a call is never lost.
Our solution allows for staff members to install a small application on their phones to seamlessly allocate the staff member their office extension on their smart device. This allows the staff member to have no longer physically to be in the office to receive and make calls. This during the current third wave of Covid-19 has allowed the Group’s staff members to safely work remotely while still being in contact with each other as though they were in the physical offices.
The main vPbx system is hosted offsite of any branch with a 99.9% uptime guarantee, this means that issues such as load shedding are no longer a major factor for the Group as staff members as able to move from the affected office to anywhere, they can use their smart phone app.
With our experience in setting up multiple clients with VPbx systems we were able to configure all branch equipment in Johannesburg and ship the equipment to each branch where their IT staff could just install and start using the system. In some of the branches the branch manager was able to do this for us with no need for IT staff.