Telephony - Furness Building Society, Leek United Building Society & Manchester Building Society

Building Societies across the UK Choose Pennine Telecom

Manchester, Furness and Leek United building societies are now using Avaya’s secure IP Telephony solutions designed, installed and managed by Pennine Telecom.

By understanding the needs of each building society we were able to deliver their specific requirements, providing solutions such as Voice over IP (VoIP), disaster recovery and mobility.   These three building society installations demonstrate how Pennine can design and install Avaya solutions that meet customers’ individual business needs.

Manchester Building Society has chosen to implement a completely converged IP Telephony solution based on Avaya’s Communication Manager IP Telephony solution. Business continuity and mobility were the two key business drivers for Manchester Building Society.  With a national network of agencies, they required a flexible business continuity infrastructure to be deployed at a reasonable cost while minimizing recovery time from a possible disaster.  “In the finance sector it is critical that we have business continuity. This was evident recently when a large proportion of businesses in Manchester lost their telecoms due to a fire in the city centre.  We can’t risk losing our telecoms and we have a duty to deliver a reliable and high level of service to our customers,” said Ian Johnson, ICT Manager of Manchester Building Society.  “Having the local survivable processor at our second site ensures that our customers will not be affected by such an event.”

The Building Society was also looking for competitive mobility features to enhance employee productivity and allow their work force to operate in the field. To that end, employees have been equipped with Avaya’s 9600 IP telephones and are trialing Avaya’s IP Softphone, which makes it easy for staff to place and receive phone calls from their laptop, making it an ideal application for employees on the move – enhancing Manchester’s Building Society ability to serve its customers.

As part of its IT strategy, Furness Building Society chose to evolve its original network, based on an Avaya INDeX solution, to allow the organization to experience the benefits of IP Telephony-based communication and improve customer service while increasing the level of business continuity. “Avaya’s INDeX solution has been performing very well for more than nine years but this strategic deployment gives us the flexibility to evolve to IP providing Furness with productivity benefits and cost savings,” said Ray Jones, IT Controller at the Society. The Furness’ new network, used by 160 employees, is based on Avaya’s Communication Manager software.

Over a single weekend, an Avaya IP Office 500 solution was deployed at Leek United Building Society’s head office so customers could benefit from the new converged voice and data system features on Monday.

“We have been very impressed with the Avaya solution, which gave us the ability to improve our customer service ensuring that business critical calls get through and reach the right person as well as the ability to handle calls quickly during peak hours and streamline call routing,”  said Stephen Boulton, Head of IT at Leek United. 

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