Key Achievements
- Successful migration from an on-premise Panasonic PBX to a feature-rich modern VoIP phone system (3CX) without any business disruption or an increase in costs.
- Improved insight into their customer experience when calling the Bluebell Railway
- Enhanced service availability for users and customers.
The Challenge
Bluebell Railway is one of the top heritage railways in the UK with over 160,000 visitors per year. The railway line has been open since 1960, and in recent years the team of volunteers behind the scenes have been working on transforming the “heritage” technology.
Paul Baker, John Dawson and Nigel Page are all highly experienced IT professionals who volunteer at Bluebell Railway in their spare time. They lead an ongoing transformation project to modernise the Railway’s IT estate.
One of the major tasks the team wanted to tackle was the communications setup across the stations and with their customers. A legacy Panasonic PBX was in place, but they would often encounter issues with outbound calling when demand was high. This downtime resulted in too many missed customer calls and general communication challenges across the railway, so finding a reliable replacement was crucial.
The Project
With the current technology no longer fit for purpose, the implementation of a modern hosted phone system would provide access to new features and drastically improve service reliability.
The IT leadership team at Bluebell were looking for a system that offered functionality such as call queueing and reporting with a commercial model suited to their budgets and business; accommodating both infrequent users making internal calls and the customer service team who leverage the system daily. The mix of use cases meant that a simultaneous call-license model would be favourable, providing the commercial flexibility they desired.
Like many similar projects – moving from an on-premise PBX to the cloud – Bluebell Railway had a myriad of options to consider, receiving proposals from 12 suppliers in total. With many of the options being put forward having similar functionality and features, what made the decision was the project management and service elements of the proposals.
“There were two key criteria in the decision-making process. Firstly, is it a good product that provides the essential features for a price close to what we pay now. Secondly, the supplier must understand our transformation project and help us do things differently. Once we had come down to the final two, Gradwell were the obvious choice for this project’’
The Results
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