Telecom Together Case Study - Cubitt Theobald

Cubitt Theobald is a specialist construction company, focused on delivering high quality projects and services to the top 5% of UK property clients. Clients expect a bespoke service with exceptional results.

Cubitt Theobald can trace its origins back to 1903 when Charles Frederick Cubitt and William Marshall Gotts set up business in Westerfield, Suffolk. The company has developed over the years, becoming Cubitt Theobald Ltd in 1998 when Cubitts merged with sister company Clement Theobald and Sons Ltd.

Today Cubitt Theobald undertakes a wide variety of projects including refurbishment, restoration, conservation, new build and maintenance, across a variety of building types: Listed and Historic; Residential; Hotels, Resturants and Pubs, and Industrial and Commercial property.

The average employee has been with the company for 16 years with an accumulated total of over 1350 years experience currently within the company.

Clients include private individuals, private and public companies, local and national government bodies and many of the established institutions. Cubitt Theobald aim to build long term partnerships with clients, and exceed their expectations.

The Business Requirements

In early 2006, Cubitt Theobald set about addressing certain business challenges to further improve client service and satisfaction.

With staff working in the office, in the workshop, and out on customer sites, Cubitt Theobald wanted to improve collaboration across the team in order to service customer expectations as efficiently as possible. They wanted incoming calls to be routed - as far as possible - to the right person, regardless of where that person was. They wanted client information to be delivered to staff PCs along with the telephone call.

From a management perspective, the Cubitt Theobald team wanted to understand call patterns so that staff could be available to respond quickly and efficiently. They wanted to be able to manage and audit costs, and the ability to record and store certain calls against the customer data base was identified as beneficial to the business. Within the process it was also recognised that having workable policies for business continuity was important.

Director Robert Cubitt commented: 'Our staff were often difficult to contact whilst in the office as they often met informally in each others offices to discuss projects.. To work around this problem we had a speaker-phone paging system in every room that announced staff calls but was a constant interruption to work. Our switchboard operators also found it difficult tracking staff locations , which often meant customers had to wait whilst their contact was tracked down'.

'Messages - whether email or post it, could not be tracked to confirm action, and calls on hold could be difficult to manage with lots of calls and three switchboards making it a challenge to remember who was on which line for which staff member'.

Addressing the business challenges

Cubitt Theobald set about addressing these challenges by taking a very thorough look at the market place, and investing time to visit multiple service providers, and to examine a broad range of the leading technology manufacturers.

As the understanding of what was possible grew, the requirements became more exacting. One solution was trialled but found wanting, and in time a solution was selected from Legal Rapport using a combination of Mitel VoIP, Corebridge middleware, and HP local area network switches.

Robert Cubitt commented: 'We are committed to providing levels of customer service that the top 5% of property clients expect - very responsive. The solution that we now have works for us in a variety of ways to support us in delivering a very responsive service. Staff in remote offices are a part of our system - just as if they were in our head office; we have a number of twinned desktop to wireless phones that have reception anywhere on our site, so we can be sure to be available to respond to clients; we can have our mobile phones ring at the same time as our desk phones so we can choose to take calls even when we are off site, and if it happens that we do miss a call, the system will send us an email to notify us of it.

In addition, the solution is linked to our customer relationship management database, and appropriate customer records are displayed on screen at the same time as a telephone call comes in. If we want to call a client, we just click on the number on our database, and the call gets initiated.

'Whilst it is hard to quantify many of the benefits of the solution we have selected and deployed, it has addressed all of the business requirements we had, and a few more besides. Our staff are working and communicating efficiently; Clients can get through to the person they want, when they want, and we take valuable management information from the system that helps improve our business. We continue to work with Legal Rapport to develop the service further, but we have realised the objectives of the review process that we started in 2006