Mitel Case Study - Countrywide Property Solicitors

When your business has gone through significant growth your information and communication technology (ICT) may not have kept pace. It is very easy to find your communications infrastructure is no longer able to cope with the demands modern business places on the technology. This case study outlines how a large conveyancing company went through fast expansion in a few years and needed to integrate its ICT equipment with various different other infrastructures. Not only did the company achieve this but also improved management processes, customer services and business efficiencies.

Due to significant growth the technology used by CPL had not grown inline with the expansion plans. As a result CPL management realised they were not able to track customer interactivity as well as they should have been able to. At CPL’s Manchester office calls are fielded for vendors, estate agencies and other lawyers across the UK. This site was handling approximately 35,000 calls a week. However, CPL’s incumbent telephony system could not provide the requirement CPL demanded.

On top of this CPL faced numerous obstacles if it was to improve communication and efficiency. The shortlist of immediate issues included:

• The ability to track and measure internal call transfers.
• Monitoring and reporting on inbound and outbound call traffic.
• Implementing a call recording solution for dispute resolution and training.
• The ability to route calls back to the same agent who last dealt with the enquiry.
• A solution which enabled management to accurately tag calls with the company ‘Matter Number’*.
• An easy to use and easy to update internal directory service.
• A solution which could seamlessly link to other telephony switched within the business.
• A fault tolerant and redundant system.

Having reviewed numerous solutions available in the market CPL decided to review 10 suppliers in order to get the best choice available. The winning reseller knew only a unique offering would secure the deal.

It was here that the unique Open Architecture Interface (OAI) of the Inter-Tel system came to the fore. The OAI allows third party vendors to seamlessly integrate bespoke solutions with the telephony platform therefore maximising its potential. Fortunately, the reseller was able to offer additional integration to the telephony platform which seriously enhanced its features and benefits.

Euan Vivash Operations Manager of CPL said: “We chose the solution because it offered a great breadth of functionality and also because, through its partner, it could provide us with a bespoke solution that would fit with our business requirements.” It was essential that the telephone systems integrated with other different manufacturer telephone systems on the network and at other sites around the country as a large percentage of call traffic at CPL comprises internal transfers from head office to lawyers or estate agents.

This was a deciding factor for CPL when choosing not only the hardware manufacturer but also the reseller. Only their chosen reseller was able to write bespoke software to enable call traffic monitoring and reporting on internal call transfers. When an agent takes a call and that call is transferred to a lawyer (be it Manchester, Northampton or Cardiff) the Management Information System (MIS) report can show CPL how long the receiving Lawyer works with the agent before transfer of the customer and this time can be taken into account when analysing agent productivity.

A second phase of installation saw the implementation of some of the more complex elements of the solution, including Computer Telephony Integration (CTI), Call Recording and Interactive Voice Recognition (IVR). An easy-to-search, bespoke directory listing to the system was also added by the reseller.

The IVR solution was again written specifically for CPL by the reseller. The caller is presented with a request to enter a numeric ‘matter number’ after which the IVR performs a database lookup, routes the caller to the agent dealing with that case and sets the matter number as the account code on the call. This account code is then used to report on the MIS system and for search and playback of call recordings.

Enquiry calls to lenders by agents can contain multiple Matter Numbers and, in those instances, the reseller integrated IntellAgent™ with their own bulk call recording system. By doing this the agent is able to tag recorded calls at any point (up to 20 in any one call) and the call recorder puts a “timeline” marker on the recording at the point where one matter number changed to another thus enabling fast search and location of where specific matter numbers occur during the call.