Porter Dodson case study: Gamma provides a winning formula for West Country legal firm
When it comes to customer retention, west country legal firm Porter Dodson makes a point of putting personal service front and centre of everything it does for its clients – whether private or commercial.
It’s an approach that has earned the company glowing testimonials from its customers as well as recognition from industry bodies, being ranked by The Lawyer magazine among the UK’s top 200 law firms, and having its solicitors recognised in Chambers and the Legal 500.
With roots that go back to the 19th century, Porter Dodson is the result of amalgamation of several firms from across the west country. Today it has offices in in Yeovil, Taunton and five other towns. The company works in most areas of business and personal law and has specialist knowledge in the fields of education, rural business including renewable energy, care homes, medical practice and family law.
A key element of its commitment to customer satisfaction is being readily available, recognising that direct phone access to its people is crucial to building trusted relationships with clients.
The Benefits
- Seamless move to SIP during office move
- Clarity and depth of billing data
- Vastly improved resilience
- Improved customer service
- A provider with unrivalled knowledge of SIP
- Instant and transparent disaster recovery
- Significant cost reductions
The Challenge
Facing the prospect of a move to new premises in Yeovil, Porter Dodson took the opportunity to review its telephony, at that time based around ISDN technology from the incumbent provider. It had proven to be expensive and, worse still, not to offer the degree of resilience required. As a previous outage had shown, the only back-up option under ISDN had been to divert some 250 extensions to just one number at another office. Even this simple move had taken the provider an hour or more to implement, undermining Porter Dodson’s commitment to being easily contactable.
As well as extra resilience, Porter Dodson also wanted more flexibility from its telephony with more call routing options, better numbering and diversion and more granular overall control; functionality that ISDN cannot deliver. The firm also wanted better, more responsive and more proactive customer service from its provider, both in day-to-day account management and in technical support. Another priority was getting more in-depth billing data to allow allocation to departments and cost centres, and to enable detailed analysis for management information purposes.
250
DDIs needing transferring
The Solution
With inbound and outbound phone calls such a high priority for Porter Dodson, we provisioned 80 SIP trunks at each of its offices in Taunton and Yeovil. These are delivered over voice dedicated Gamma Ethernet circuits, with Porter Dodson’s existing data connections acting as a first line of back-up. The SIP trunks connect into the firm’s own Cisco PBXs running CallManager which support Microsoft’s Skype For Business. Also included is a Gamma calls and lines package, including free minutes, which has delivered significant savings in call costs.
The Results
But cost savings were by no means the primary objective. Indeed they have come as a welcome but coincidental bonus to the firm. The primary goals were always better resilience, improved flexibility, better customer service and more qualitative billing information. And all this has been more than realised by the switch to Gamma SIP telephony. The resilience of the system has been tested and full restoral of telephony occurred entirely automatically within just a few seconds, and with no disruption to business.
