Mitel UC solution drives down costs, says real estate firm

Peter Dinham
Sunday, 25 October 2009 12:21

IT Industry - Deals

A Victorian real estate agency has completed implementation of a Mitel unified communications solution which the firm says has significantly reduced ongoing communications costs and enhanced collaboration between employees located across four different sites.

According to finance manager for the Great Ocean Road Real Estate Agency, Brad Weetman, the agency’s business has grown rapidly through the merger of several real estate agencies, and “we found ourselves with separate phone systems at each of our offices. We crunched the numbers, and found that by moving to Mitel we could spend less every month, while providing all of our employees with the latest unified communications and conferencing tools.

“Our Mitel solution paid for itself in immediate cost savings.”

Weetman said that, with an extremely mobile workforce, the agency had deployed Mitel Unified Communicator Advanced software, which had given the users single-portal access to Mitel business communications applications, “allowing employees to instantly view detailed presence information for colleagues across the four office locations.

“Now, independent of location, employees can instantly see whether a team member is at their desk or out of the office, ensuring more efficient customer call handling. To further improve employee productivity, Unified Communicator Advanced has been integrated with Microsoft Outlook, making it possible to simply click on Microsoft Outlook contacts to make phone calls.”

The entire solution deployed by the agency was designed and implemented by Connectel, a Geelong-based Mitel premierPARTNER, with Connectel providing ongoing remote management and support for the agency’s entire data and voice infrastructure.

According to Weetman, the distances between the four office locations are also significant and, to
reduce the impact on productivity during travel time, “regular team meetings are routinely held via phone conference.

Weetman says that the real estate agency decided to implement Mitel Audio Web Conferencing to replace an expensive externally hosted voice conference service, and he claimed the business is now able to instantly establish conference calls between offices via the broadband IP network, without incurring any additional costs.

“In addition to voice-based conferencing, team members are now able to use interactive whiteboard software, and share documents via easy-to-use web-based collaboration, further improving the productivity of meetings.

“Our business relies heavily on teamwork between our offices. Mitel’s UC Advanced and Audio Web Conferencing solutions have helped us to minimise both our costs and travel time. The presence (sic) capabilities of our Mitel solution have really helped break down the barriers between our offices, and made it much easier to direct incoming customer enquiries to the best person. The combined result has been a noticeable improvement in our overall employee productivity.

According to Mitel vice president for Asia Pacific, Gwilym Funnell, “old fashioned phone systems can place a heavy burden on your budget and hold back productivity, and he said the company’s unified communications software solutions help Great Ocean Road Real Estate to “reduce their costs, while giving employees the ability to communicate and collaborate effectively - regardless of location.”