Students are generally the first to adopt new technology and were constantly demanding new dynamic ways of working. Our knowledge base area was very unreliable with files often crashing the system due to a throttled connection.
As a large professional study centre, serving over 1000 post-graduate students, e-learning was forefront of everyone’s mind with the ever present challenge of working more flexibly and efficiently. We knew that there must be a better way to share information and access remote workers but suspected our leased lines were letting us down – they were expensive too.
Even worse, because we had up to 40 lecturers delivering training via phone, the call costs were spiralling. The quality was questionable too with calls sometime being cut-off for no reason whatsoever.
The Solution
The first thing to tackle was spend – it was difficult to manage 3 separate invoices each month and when we calculated total monthly communications spend, we were shocked. For something so critical to running the organisation, we had let our telecoms spend run wild, totally forgotten as we were busy with other things.
We also knew we needed to work more effectively between our sites and remote homeworkers but the architecture didn’t support a streamlined approach as it had been extended and added to over and over, creating a patchwork of ‘short-term fixes’. TalkTalk Business helped us look at it from a different perspective – starting with needs and longer term requirements before even considering bandwidth needs and costs.
Reliability was also a big consideration as connections were often slow during busy periods and we’d often loose connection when we needed it most; during a web-ex conference or when delivering feedback to students in time for their submission dates. Lecturers were frustrated, students didn’t trust our service offering due to all the technical ‘glitches’ and costs were spiralling.
Fundamentally, the changes were made possible by TalkTalk Business’s Next Generation Network – because it’s built with new technology at its heart, it can be flexible yet robust and leverages new technology to pass on savings to customers which other providers struggle to match due to older, legacy network infrastructures. What’s more, with guaranteed bandwidth and disaster recovery back-up, should the worst happen, with TalkTalk Business you’re covered.
By installing an IPVPN service, our remote workers can now access shared files from one central location via a simple login, securely, around the clock and different services such as voice, web conferencing and email can be prioritised depending on your needs. Connection has been addressed with the introduction of Ethernet allowing us to adjust our bandwidth to suit our needs, offering up to 1Gbps capacity should we ever need it. Inter-site calls are now typically 20% less than previous due to the network being more efficient.
We worked with TalkTalk Business to change our existing telephone system (which was due for another costly upgrade) to a hosted solution, where the service is managed in ‘the cloud’ to reduce cap-ex, reduce maintenance costs and unlock a number of call handling services as you need them. This means that when we take a call, we can seamlessly transfer the caller through to any of our remote workers as if they are at their desk, in the office. This has greatly improved the customer experience and proved to manage inbound call traffic far more effectively instead of rummaging around for numbers or taking messages.
All this, coupled with super-low call rates to other sites and secure data back-up, everyone is happier knowing we now have a network architecture that works, costs far less, reduces day-to-day management and can grow with us.