Legal firm adopts unified communications saving £30,000 per year

Swyx has been selected by Raleys Solicitors to replace a Centrex based outsourced telephony system

London, 11.09.2009 - Swyx a market-leading vendor of Unified Communications for SMEs has been selected by Raleys Solicitors, established in 1883, to replace a Centrex based outsourced telephony system. The new software IP based SwyxWare unified communications solution supplied by Digital Exchange means the company can integrate ‘voice’ into its virtualised IT infrastructure,  improve customer service and make significant annual cost-savings.

The Barnsley based solicitors practice is one of the region’s largest legal firms employing 145 staff.  For the past 7 years the company had relied on an outsourced managed telephony service based on Centrex. However the running costs including call charges were very high incurring total fees of up to £64,000 per year.  Raleys’ Chief Technology Officer Richard Hilton explained, “Not only were the rental costs expensive, we were frustrated by the lack of response from our supplier when we asked for any moves or changes to be done.  We were also aware that new alternative VoIP unified comms offerings on the market could give us more flexibility and features allowing us to integrate ‘voice’ with our other applications giving our clients better customer service as well as securing substantial cost-savings.”

The company reviewed a large number of solutions on the market including Lucent, Panasonic, Samsung and Cisco but none of these gave them the flexibility and cost-savings they were looking for.  

Richard Hilton says “Finally a local supplier Digital Exchange (Yorkshire) Ltd and Swyx Silver partner recommended SwyxWare which ticked all the boxes. It had a user-friendly web interface that was easy to understand and because it is software and is IP based we had the additional advantages of an affordable licence model and the ability to integrate our telephony with our other IT systems.”

He continued, “In the legal sector the majority of our work is conducted over the phone and it’s imperative that our customers have the option of talking to a human rather than a machine.  Using Swyx’s ‘presence’ functionality, it’s possible to route calls dependent on someone’s diary movements and secretaries now have the ability to pick up group calls so we can reduce the number of times the phone rings before the caller can speak to someone. Therefore if a customer calls a direct number to one of the partners, but they are not available then a secretary can pick up the call instead.”

The company has 10 SIP phones installed for meeting and conference rooms and partners are using SwyxMobile so that they have the same benefits remotely, such as call routing and lower call rates, as they would in the office. Hilton adds, “In the past we were also charged for extensions we weren’t using but because Swyx licences are concurrent you are not paying for staff connectivity unnecessarily, for example when they are on holiday. At the moment our call tariff hasn’t changed significantly but if we take advantage of SIP trunking we will be able to reduce these downwards in the future.”

According to Hilton the Swyx solution fits well with the company’s virtualised IT infrastructure based on Citrix. “Swyx is just another software application so can be managed centrally with the rest of our IT.  The integration with Outlook was the initial step in our unified communications strategy.  The second stage will be to integrate Swyx with our case management system, ‘Partner for Windows’.  In addition we will also install some of Swyx’s other extensive functionality such as call recording, voice mail and conferencing.”

Swyx Case Study