Equiniti, the leading UK provider of shareholder and employee services, recently undertook a major project to relocate its mail handling and processing functions. A communication system that would enable the company to transform the way it works was seen as central to the project's success.
Mike Jollife, Head of IT strategy and architecture at Equiniti, explains: "Our IT strategy has always been to lead the field in the delivery of innovative solutions that facilitate the efficient running of our business, enabling us to build on our track record of customer service excellence."
BT is a preferred supplier to Equiniti and, working in conjunction with Datapulse, it proposed a Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS) solution. As a unified communication platform, OCS brings together previously separate technologies like email, voicemail, and scheduling applications with both fixed and mobile telephony. That enables people to work more efficiently by using new features such as presence, which makes it possible to see at a glance if someone is available and how they wish to be communicated with.
The presence feature caught everyone's attention. "Presence increases our productivity by eliminating unnecessary calls and saving time," says Mike Jollife. "It also makes us a much more responsive business because we can get hold of people faster." With OCS, presence status is taken straight from scheduling applications such as Microsoft Outlook. Additional information, such as whether a person is on the phone or away from their desk, adds a further level of sophistication.
Equiniti will also benefit from other advanced OCS features. Integration between email and voicemail, for example, means that voice messages can either be retrieved remotely or sent as an attachment to an email. In either case they can be acted on with newfound speed. For the company's mobile workers, OCS client software turns their laptops into telephones enabling them to talk and collaborate at any time over the internet, virtually regardless of location.
Mike Jollife notes: "The familiar Microsoft interfaces meant that training costs were kept to a minimum, while changing the way that we work will add to the financial benefit."
The joint BT and Datapulse team designed and installed the OCS system and then carried out the necessary integration with the existing Equiniti IT infrastructure. Installation was completed inside an eight-week period bridging the Christmas and New Year holiday periods.
Although only just installed, OCS is already starting to meet its return on investment promise, and Equiniti is considering installing OCS at other offices to create a company-wide unified communications environment. Mike Jollife concludes: "OCS is opening up a whole raft of new possibilities, not least in terms of enhanced customer service, which is vital as our business grows and develops into new areas."