Wiltshire College has slashed its annual £100,000 phone bill by 70 per cent by installing state-of-the-art equipment that brings the 1,000-plus extensions across its four sites together in one system.
The college, one of the UK’s largest, has 3,300 full-time, 6,000 part-time and 900 university level students at its campuses in Chippenham, Lackham, Salisbury, and Trowbridge.
The award-winning Windows VoIP PBX 3CX Phone System, developed by Kingston upon Thames-based software developer 3CX, now processes the college’s 15,000 calls a week and enables it to monitor calls, manage workflow and track how many staff members are logged into the system. It also links to Android and iPhone devices.
The system, bought by the college from Reading-based IT services provider and 3CX partner Tri-Lan, replaced three Sieme
ns ISDX systems and one Avaya Index.
Tri-Lan was responsible for software installation and configuration, while the college’s ICT team carried out the rollout of 650 handsets. The total changeover took just two hours.
The college required core telephony services such as call forwarding, queues, presence, auto attendant, inbound and outbound call routing and a softphone option. It also needed to be able to add advanced features – on-screen call control, conference calls, call recording, hot-desking and mobile phone integration – at a later date. The demands of college life meant the new phone system had to be robust, cost-efficient, simple to install and easy to administer.
Wiltshire College director of customer services Stephanie Stephenson said: “The 3CX Phone System is proving flexible and reliable.
“It’s on target to reduce our ongoing telephony maintenance, line rental, support, and call costs by 70 per cent per annum, about £70,000.”
Wiltshire College joins some of the world’s leading companies and organisations in using the 3CX Phone System, including Boeing, the Caterham F1 Team, MIT and Ohio State University.
