B.O.C.

The ini­tial sit­u­a­tion

Since the com­pany was founded in 1999, the Bike and Out­door Com­pany (B.O.C.) has oper­ated a reli­ably func­tion­ing ISDN tele­phone sys­tem at its 30 loca­tions and head­quar­ters in Ham­burg. But as the ter­mi­nal devices grad­u­ally reached the end of their oper­at­ing life, Hen­ning Schor­ling, head of IT at B.O.C., felt it was time for mod­ern­iza­tion. “Espe­cially at peak times like sum­mer, we felt that impor­tant basic func­tion­al­i­ties such as mail­box, caller list, auto­matic call for­ward­ing or the pos­si­bil­ity of run­ning announce­ments texts were miss­ing“, sum­ma­rizes Schor­ling. „Not to men­tion Con­tact Cen­ter and UC func­tion­al­i­ties such as del­e­ga­tion rules or con­fer­ence calls.”

The chal­lenge

• The new tele­phone sys­tem should be able to cover the company’s diverse require­ments from a sin­gle source. PBX, ter­mi­nals or soft clients and man­age­ment soft­ware. The deci­sion was finally made in favor of a VoIP sys­tem from Inno­va­phone, cou­pled with soft­ware for admin­is­tra­tion, Con­tact Cen­ter, UC and mon­i­tor­ing
• It was also impor­tant to B.O.C., that the IT admin­is­tra­tors could finally work com­pletely with the new sys­tem by them­selves.

The solu­tion

• With the sup­port of the telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions spe­cial­ist IP Dynam­ics, B.O.C. began to replace the tele­phone sys­tems in the head office and its branches in 2017. The company’s IT depart­ment was closely involved in the imple­men­ta­tion of the smooth sys­tem change from the out­set.
• The tele­phone sys­tem was migrated to mod­ern uni­fied com­mu­ni­ca­tions sys­tems, and a Con­tact Cen­ter is also in use at the com­pany head­quar­ters.
• After the head office, the exist­ing branches will be grad­u­ally con­verted to new telecom­mu­ni­ca­tion infra­struc­ture, around eight loca­tions per year. The sys­tem change should be com­pleted company-​wide by the end of 2020.

The result

• Since most of the callers in the branches only inquire about the open­ing hours, the new tele­phone sys­tem pro­vides rel­e­vant infor­ma­tion via an announce­ment text. This gives the employ­ees in the branches more time for cus­tomer ser­vice.
• Local employ­ees can for­ward calls from out­side to exten­sions when they are in a cus­tomer meet­ing. Calls no longer go to waste, but in worst sce­nario to voice­mail.
• At head­quar­ters, the ser­vice team can use the new sys­tem to bring in addi­tional employ­ees from the back office at peak times per mouse click to absorb call peaks. This results in shorter wait­ing times at the hot­line.
• B.O.C. ‘s IT team also uses the mon­i­tor­ing func­tion­al­i­ties of the new Inno­va­phone sys­tem. They can see how many calls come in, where they end up and where calls run into the void. If nec­es­sary, they can take coun­ter­mea­sures.
• B.O.C. is con­vinced of the advan­tages of the changeover and is equip­ping all newly opened loca­tions with IP tele­phony.

If you are also inter­ested in mod­ern­iz­ing your tele­phone sys­tem, please do not hes­i­tate to con­tact us.