Leading international logistics firm sees improved business efficiency by replacing legacy VOIP system with CallSwitch hosted telephony.
Understanding the requirements
Sandford Freight UK is a leading international freight forwarding and logistics company, based at London Heathrow airport. Established in 1998, the business has expanded rapidly, and today serves a global customer base, being recognised for delivering a professional and personal service with operations including air, sea, and road freight.
Telecommunications sit at the heart of Sandford Freight UK’s day-to-day operations, with a constant requirement to be immediately available to customers and suppliers. In a competitive industry driven by service levels, guaranteed on-time deliveries, and cost-effectiveness, the ability to communicate effectively is essential.
The challenge
In 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic forced the UK into the first of several lockdowns, Sandford Freight UK was required to implement remote working for its employees, and its existing BroadSoft system was not able to support this new way of working.
Daniel Walker, General Manager, says, “When we were required to move to remote working for most of our staff, our old system just didn’t have the flexibility to support us. We could only forward calls to one number so our managing director had to handle all our call traffic.
“We weren’t able to use an auto-attendant, and because we couldn’t use mobile applications or have employees take calls from their desktops, the business really struggled to continue smoothly. Managing out-of-hours calls is just a normal part of our industry, it’s pretty 24/7.”
Additionally, the company was challenged by an out-of-date call bundle that didn’t support the volume of international calls made by the business as part of its everyday operations. Walker adds, “Once lockdown was over, we realised many of the shortfalls of our system were actually affecting our business in the longer term, so we set out to find something more flexible.”
The solution
After consultation, the key stakeholders at Sandford Freight UK opted for a CallSwitch cloud-hosted UCaaS solution to meet the company’s demands for a flexible and cost-effective communications solution that could deliver productivity to a distributed workforce and support out-of-hours call traffic when needed.
Included as part of this service, Sandford Freight UK received premium Yealink desk phones for every one of their 20 employees as part of its subscription, along with free access to proprietary CallSwitch Communicator mobile and desktop applications, and WebRTC browser access. The business also opted to add an advanced conference unit to its solution for the company’s boardroom.
Additionally, a bespoke call package was provided, with generous international minutes supporting the frequent calls to overseas locations made by employees, and custom auto-attendant messaging allowing for more intelligent inbound call routing to improve customer service.
Walker says, “It was time for us to really overhaul the system we had in place, so it was important we found a supplier who could consult us around our requirements. The CallSwitch pre-sales engineers took the time to understand our business and really sold us on the benefits of the CallSwitch platform.”
The benefits
Since implementing CallSwitch, Sandford Freight UK has seen many productivity and cost-saving benefits that have helped to support its growth aspirations, while enabling the company to meet the high levels of service its customers expect.
With mobile and desktop access for employees, the business can offer more flexibility around ways of working, with customer calls easily made and received from home when required, either in or out of office hours.
The international call bundles the business received has also helped to reduce costs, with many of Sandford Freight UK’s frequently dialled overseas destinations included for free. With free calls between extensions the company also benefits from no costs for internal calls, and even benefits from the CallSwitch internal chat service.
Walker noted: “We’ve been really happy with CallSwitch. It’s improved our ability to communicate with customers, and internally. All our staff now have the Communicator app on their mobiles and computers, and it’s so easy for them to make calls normally wherever they are. It’s much more efficient.
“The system has been more reliable than our previous one. We’ve not really had any issues, but the one time we’ve had to raise a ticket, it was solved quickly without us having to chase.
“We had an engineer on site to help us install our devices who was very knowledgeable, and the CallSwitch product trainer came to our offices to help our staff make the most of all the new features. She was very friendly and helpful. We would definitely recommend CallSwitch.”
