Royal British Legion Industries (RBLI), a national charity that provides training, support, care and employment to the Armed Forces Community, is deploying an all new hosted telephony service to connect six UK offices. One of their key objectives is to become closer to the people they work with and for, and the new service, delivered and managed by Olive Communications, will support this. The RBLI will benefit from a true fixed-mobile converged solution, meaning calls can be routed seamlessly across fixed lines or mobile devices.
Royal British Legion Industries is a national charity established in 1919 to provide treatment, training and support to service personnel returning from the Great War. Known first as Industrial Settlements Inc., RBLI began by taking ownership of Preston Hall in Aylesford, and mostly provided superlative care to tuberculous ex-servicemen.
Since then, they have expanded and developed, and now have a number of offices and factories where they employ veterans as part of social enterprises. It is therefore vital that the RBLI, with over 300 employees spread across these offices, have reliable inbound and outbound connectivity to communicate effectively.
The new service will see all six of the RBLI's sites connected together on a single platform. The contract, devised by Olive, will also gain them free calls between offices, as well as guaranteeing constant and effective communication (through jointly established Service Level Agreements).
The new hosted telephony service complements the mobile services Olive currently provides to RBLI. By converging their fixed lines (through the hosted service) and mobile contract under a single Olive Managed Service Agreement, RBLI will benefit in two ways. Firstly, from the improved functionality a fixed-mobile environment provides. These include call routing across different devices and locations to ensure RBLI never miss a business call, business continuity in the event of a disaster, and PBX features available on mobile devices.
Secondly, RBLI will also gain a commercial advantage by procuring their mobile and fixed lines together, so they can deploy the right device to the right user, all under a single pricing structure.
Kate Porter, Head of Business Systems, RBLI, said: "We had two primary challenges we needed to cover off before we could be confident about moving to a hosted platform: cost and control. But the team at Olive have been agile and commercially astute to ensure the project came with no capital expenditure. They have also provided us with an online management portal which will help us manage call flow, obtain call stats and scale the solution as and when we need to."
Olive, as a leading UK managed communications provider, has a broad portfolio of technology products and services it manages on behalf of its customers. The telecoms market is fast moving with many deployment models and options, making it difficult for buyers to navigate with assurance. Olive seek to understand their customer's objectives, and then map the most appropriate and cost-effective solution to suit.
Porter concludes: "Olive has provided our mobile telephony for a number of years and consistently delivered a good service. And when our fixed and mobile line contract was up for renewal, they took a consultative approach and helped us evaluate our priorities as an organisation. They then recommended new technology and commercial options that could potentially help us be more productive as well as save us money. The result was opting to move to a hosted platform, and we look forward to working with them to deliver the project."
