Teams phone system heralds new ways of working at BGB

Replacing archaic technology with a full teams telephony back end transformed user experience, IT workloads and customer responsiveness.

Company Background

BGB is an engineering solutions provider with 100 employees based in Grantham and Virginia, USA. In 2020, their new IT Manager joined with the challenge of supporting a productive homeworking workforce top of the agenda.

The Challenge

An IT manager’s headache

A dated phone system, vulnerable to failure and difficult to support
Calls transferred to homeworkers lost
Three sites, two different systems

The existing 15-year-old on premise phone server was out of warranty and had limited support, posing a significant risk for us. “As a result of this we experienced a significant period of downtime with no phone lines, ultimately leading us to opt for the Teams phone solution,” explained Reuban Hall-Smith, BGB’s IT Manager.There was also next to no remote working functionality on the system and customer calls would be lost. The UK and US phone systems were not connected, vulnerable to failure, difficult to scale up and down, and becoming too much to manage.

The Solution

Ease of use and deployment

A fully featured Teams based phone system
All the right phone functionality with the existing Teams interface
One system for all sites and homeworkers

The Teams phone solution was selected for the fully featured back end that performs like a full phone system whether employees are in the office or working remotely.

"It’s got that ability to do both things well. We don’t need any additional bits of software. Everyone’s familiar with the Teams interface and they’re comfortable using a headset. There are minimal training requirements and it’s easy to deploy."

– Reuban Hall-Smith, IT Manager

The Results

The ideal platform

The familiarity of Teams plus telephony in one platform
Seamless customer and user experience regardless of location
Easy to deploy, support and scale
Reduced overheads with running one single system

The system has delivered a more seamless, responsive customer experience and really backed the global ‘one BGB’ initiative.

As Reuban explained, “We wanted to bring everyone together across the US and UK under one phone system, so when a customer calls up, we can transfer them seamlessly between sites, time zones permitting.It’s easy to transfer calls to people internally or externally, as well as add internal or external participants to calls.”

As Teams is already a familiar platform, employees were able to pick it up quickly, removing the burden of training and troubleshooting support from IT.

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