About 4Com plc
Since 1999, 4Com has focused on delivering business communications solutions that save time and increase revenue, staff productivity and profitability. Now with more than 70,000 users and 8,000 installations in the UK, company revenues exceed £20m. Their team of over 100 employees achieve award‐winning customer service and maintenance, a key element of the overall business strategy.
In order to provide excellence to customers, 4Com embarked on a review to evaluate their product portfolio. When it became clear that the call management offering could be improved, 4Com commenced a market assessment.
Tollring became known to them through their association with Samsung and it soon became clear that Tollring software applications offer ‘best of breed’ within the call recording and reporting arena, with the added advantage of a white‐label option. The long term objective for 4Com is to build a strong brand, so an own‐branded solution provides the ideal model, in line with business goals.
It was acknowledged that the right products would deliver improvements to productivity within the engineering and support teams:
Recognising that every business, irrespective of type or size can benefit from call recording, call reporting and business analytics, 4Com partnered Tollring to deliver the latest fully integrated and own‐labelled business communications solution. Every phone system sold by 4Com is bundled with their own‐branded call recording(4Record) and call reporting (4Report) tools to add value to the sale. Where required, for example amongst larger clients, computer telephony integration is simply delivered as an integral part of the overall solution.
The integrated turnkey solution from Tollring has made the entire installation process much simpler and quicker. The team now spend 50% less time installing, maintaining and licencing the software so is able to install more systems than ever before. Engineers no longer struggle with trying to install disparate applications that were not only much more cumbersome and time consuming to install, but were also far inferior to the Tollring suite.
“4com plc has been providing customers with business call reporting and recording tools for many years, however we were never able to provide a truly integrated and comprehensive suite of applications like we can now. The transition we made to the Tollring package has been outstanding, saving 50% of time on installations and resulting in a 25-30% increase in support profitability.”
R. Barratt, Installation Director
Tollring recently introduced a fully automated licensing engine which has reduced the time engineers spend on site even further and simplified the management of clients’ ever‐changing needs. If a customer needs to upgrade, whether to add more call recording channels or more reporting clients, 4Com simply send through a purchase order and the additional products are licensed on the customer’s server immediately, without requiring any additional engineering resource. This ensures effective and efficient use of engineers’ time, allowing them to focus on installing new systems as opposed to revisiting existing sites.
Tollring’s proactive health‐check service collects data from each customer and sends diagnostics to a centralised web based CRM system every 15 minutes. Any customer who has missed call recordings or call logging records are flagged up immediately. This has resulted in very few faults being logged, reducing calls to the helpdesk by 60‐80%.
On the support side, live updates are ‘pushed’ to customers at midnight, automatically delivering new features.
“One of the issues we have always struggled with as a result of our very large install base is proactively ensuring all systems in the field are in good working order. Tollring’s proactive health-check service has made a huge difference to the way we support end customers, reducing support calls by 60-80%.”
A. Sullivan, Maintenance Director
4Com has built a strong relationship with the Tollring support desk and development team, so are confident in what they can deliver to customers, reassured that they can meet the majority of their specific requirements. The flexibility of Tollring’s reporting and dashboard framework allows 4Com to meet the increasing demands for customisation, whether for integration with back office processes and CRM systems or a specific data visualisation. The team is making a concerted effort to migrate as many legacy customers as possible to the superior Tollring solution.
Tollring’s capability and commitment has exceeded expectations, all in a relatively short period of time, demonstrated by the results:
Tollring will help 4Com achieve aggressive sales targets by continuing to develop product features in line with customer needs. The latest focus is on vertical features as call analytics becomes an increasingly significant part of customer relationship management.
