Hidden Hearing saves £250,000 annually and underpins customer care commitment

When your main competition is the £1.5Bn giant Specsavers and the €600M global Amplifon Group you’d better be doing something right. And more than 100,000 people a year agree that specialist hearing healthcare company Hidden Hearing does. With more than 40 years experience and a reputation second to none it is for many the most trusted in its business.

The Benefits

  • Line rental and call cost savings of £250,000 annually.
  • Total control over inbound call routing, improving customer service.
  • New system meets corporate standards for security, resilience and reliability.
  • Call recording now possible for compliance, quality and training.
  • Access to extensive call and billing statistics.
  • One point of contact for everything telecommunications related.

The Challenge

With 86 branches from Inverness to Truro, Hidden Hearing had a telephone estate based on analogue and digital technology with an ISDN PBX at its Maidstone head office.

The technology allowed no opportunity to collect billing and management information centrally, nor did it permit any intelligent call handling or call routing. Inbound callers were sometimes greeted by voicemail with no forwarding options.

Hidden Hearing wanted to rationalise its telephony deployment with a system able to route calls intelligently, provide management information and additionally support call recording to ensure standards of quality and care.

At the same time its parent company’s security policies mandated that resilience and reliability be built into the new system, with automatic failover to alternate lines.

86

Branches Based On Analogue & Digital Tech

The Solution

Gamma project managers helped run the entire migration project away from their legacy solution to our own next generation network. This ensured a smooth delivery of services on time and to plan.

Phone connections at branches were replaced with MPLS virtual private network connections with ISDN available as backup, and analogue as further backup still – a real belt and braces approach.

All incoming calls now go through their Maidstone office with our hosted Inbound platform routing them onwards intelligently. This gives Hidden Hearing flexible choices over how calls are switched and where they are answered.

Local branches have been paired geographically allowing calls to one to be automatically routed to the next nearest branch when busy. This ensures callers are met with local accents and local knowledge.

A ShoreTel IPPBX has replaced the out of date technology across Hidden Hearing’s estate. Call recording for compliance, quality and training purposes is available on all calls.

Full statistics and billing data are now available across the entire system allowing Hidden Hearing’s IT team to generate custom management reports and to better control their costs.