Future Voice delivers urgent upgrade to ensure consultancy stays connected

Bradley Environmental Consultants Ltd (BECL) is a leading national provider of asbestos, legionella, workplace exposure monitoring, training and health & safety services. With seven regional locations, BECL prides itself in being a trusted partner for workplace Health, Safety and Risk Management solutions, providing a variety of specialist consultancy services across a wide range of sectors, including Universities, NHS Trusts, Councils and many national organisations, High Street and national brands.

BECL’s incumbent telecoms provider had previously locked the business into a lengthy 7-year contract for its on-site PBX. While the 2-site system, which supported all of BECL’s seven sites, worked perfectly at the start of the agreement, issues and outages started to appear, especially after the provider migrated its services to our previous supplier.

More importantly, the Managed Service Provider increasingly distanced itself from Lee Hickman, BECL’s IT Supervisor, and his team. Not only did this irreparably damage his trust in the supplier but also meant that simple changes and urgent issues would take weeks to be answered.

“Even when we gave them plenty of notice to set up a call divert for a week while we were closed, it was done on the Thursday before we reopened, so it ended up being faster for us to make changes ourselves than get [our supplier] to do it!”
– Lee Hickman, IT Supervisor, Bradley Environmental Consultants

After sending the opportunity out for tender, challenging the potential partners around how best to replicate their existing calling environments, BECL received multiple proposals, including options from BT and Gamma, among others.

“We knew we needed a more ‘hybrid-working-friendly’ solution and started exploring solutions from 8×8, 3CX and Horizon.”

However, Lee and the team chose to trust Future Voice with their communications due to the team’s combination of passion, technical knowledge and approachability.

“From the first call, it was evident that Tom and his team knew the technology, but they also knew how to work with people. There was no ‘hard sell’ or ‘umming and ahhing’. They just spoke to us like real people and were always available to answer any questions we had.”

By this point, the team only had three months to complete the migration, so Future Voice ensured that any delays were mitigated, putting multiple backup plans in place if certain deadlines were missed, for example if the incumbent didn’t port BECL’s numbers by the given deadline.

Then, a significant outage just a month before the incumbent’s contract ended accelerated the transition even more. The incumbent refused to fix the issue, given the challenges and expense of sourcing hardware for the legacy system and delivering the repair.

Future Voice rallied to support Lee and his team, getting the RingCentral live a month early, ensuring that BECL’s lines stayed open through the outage and that no sites were uncontactable, even during the critical outage.

“When we set the go-live for January, Future Voice became indispensable. Migrating all the sites across the entire company was a challenge, however with weekly Teams meetings all preparations were carried out remotely, the entire process was seamless, and the platform was migrated perfectly!”

Now, Lee can rest easily with a highly reliable communication-compatible solution, removing the need for costly on-site maintenance. Plus, BECL can offer its team a robust and secure hybrid-working experience, enabling them to be more productive no matter where they are.

The option for contacts to directly call individual members of the BECL team and leave voicemails has been particularly beneficial, significantly reducing calls to the company’s main number. Plus, field engineers have also relished having their phone numbers on-site, enabling them to alert customers to road delays and contact other team members more efficiently.

For Lee and his team, the administration experience is far simpler, with an easy-to-use, single pane of glass interface that makes managing the platform a breeze.

“There’s just no headaches with our comms system any more. The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, and we’ve now got a solid foundation from which to improve via RingCentral’s reporting and Customer Experience tools.”

So much so, that Lee has already migrated all sites’ internet connections, with Future Voice’s support, to future-proof Full Fibre. The team again became invaluable pushing Openreach to keep to its timeframe when installation appointments started to be missed.

“Future Voice has proven itself to be an expert team that we can rely on for anything and everything, and I know wehave a trusted partner who will support our goals for years to come.”