Local School Case Study
A local school had a need to reduce the number of lines it rented, while making better use of the staff it employs. They wanted to make the teachers and heads of year more contactable and use messaging for when they were teaching or not present. This was a large grammar school with about 100 extensions including staff areas, public sports hall and swimming pool.
The Solution
The solution was to combination a number of technologies including ISDN, Voice Mail and Auto Attendant. We chose a Samsung OfficeServ for this project as it had the capacity required along with a very flexible Voice Mail and Auto Attendant system.
The Auto Attendant is the, love it or loath it, system that answers the call and presents the customer with the “Press 1 for the School office, 2 for Finance or hold for the general office” type message.
This was the first step towards better employee efficiency. They wanted to get away from one person in the office answering every call to then have to “chase” around trying to find people. This, as you can imagine, is a very inefficient use of time. Now the system answers the call and only users trying to talk to the office get there. Other callers will now direct their own calls to other departments. The system was set up to ask if the caller knew the extension number they wanted they could get straight there by dialing it.
Next we upgraded the lines to ISDN, this on its own is not a saving but it enables the use of Direct Dial or DDI numbers. We ordered a group of 60 numbers so the main departments could give out a local number that, when dialed, bypassed the main greeting completely. In addition we were able to delete some odd analogue telephone lines, but importantly, retain the number that suppliers already knew. In total we cut the number of lines from 11 to 6.
Finally we installed a Voice Mail system. This is best described as an answer phone for each extension. If an extension is dialed, however the call gets there, that is either unanswered or busy the call is directed to a personal greeting that invites the caller to leave a message. This is then retrieved by the user by dialing the voice mail system, entering a security pass code and then the messages are played back, with instructions, a little like a mobile phone voice mail.
The system also allowed the phones in public areas to have restricted dialing. Allowing only internal or emergency calls.
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