Netcall assists roadtohealth on their journey by hosting their communications platform

Wednesday, August 19, 2009

Hosted SIP PBX allows small businesses to use large company technology at  a fraction of the cost

Eastbourne and Nottingham based roadtohealth (RTH) provides health risk management, health screening and occupational health services to corporate businesses, the public sector, primary care trusts, the insurance industry, Pharmacy and consumers.  Due to growth in demand they have recently expanded their operations and sales support function by opening new offices in Cambridgeshire.

This move to another premises highlighted the requirement for a voice communication system which needed to include access for remote workers and, from a financial perspective, RTH wanted to have scaleability of systems and resources whilst minimising up-front capital expenditure. The company considered a variety of options and suppliers which would best meet their business needs.

As a result it was decided that a hosted solution would deliver the key business benefits RTH were looking at, at an attractive cost level.  A major consideration was either large capital expenditure with a traditional approach or simple monthly charges with a flexible software-as-a-service solution managed via a web-interface.

Netcall was able to supply the solution RTH was looking for by delivering the service using a Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) Communications Server.  This service is fully managed for RTH on Netcall’s Intelligent Communication Platform™ (ICP) located in Netcall’s ‘Cloud’ at locations in London.

One of the key benefits to RTH of using SIP to deliver voice is that it is so much easier to install and configure than traditional phone systems. All RTH needed to do was simply plug in their handsets to their existing office LAN. This resulted in a phone system that was immediately available and included such feature-rich facilities as voice-mail and conferencing.

This hosted approach will reduce RTH’s on-going costs and will seamlessly connect remote workers to the system while providing them with simple and rapid in-built capacity to expand with their business. Users have a ‘Softphone’ capability on their computers and laptops which allows RTH to have remote workers based all over the world. When callers dial a geographic number the call is connected to wherever they are located.

Paul Gaudin, Group Business Development Director at roadtohealth said: “Moving to new offices is always complicated and distracting; we were looking at installing a conventional telephone system but were blown away by the potential opportunities of the hosted service from Netcall. This delivers all the capabilities of a traditional phone system but means we don’t have to purchase any hardware which dates quickly or deal with multiple suppliers for hardware and voice minutes. It also provides us great scalability as the business grows.”

The benefits of Netcall hosting the platform meant that the service was up and running very rapidly.  It also enabled RTH to provide improved customer service & productivity without having to employ extra staff to install, configure or maintain the service.

Richard Farrell, CTO at Netcall explains: “We are delighted that roadtohealth was able to take advantage of the communications solutions that have previously only been available to larger organisations.  RTH is a highly innovative company and we have discovered that we are a great match. Our experience running a high-availability communications cloud for more than ten years means that we are able to concentrate on delivering to our customers the best applications at a compelling cost advantage for their businesses.”

Paul Gaudin continued: “Using such an impressive and flexible solution means we can offer our customers great business continuity.  Whether staff are based in the office or working remotely, our customers will receive the same high-quality level of service. We’re also very excited about the wide range of other Netcall applications which we plan to use in the future, such as their web call-back solution CallMeBack and InTouch, their automated messaging solution.

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