By Laura Waterton
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Gary Hodgson, IT Project Manager
WaterAid is a federated organisation that provides sanitation services for people living in areas of extreme poverty. Around the world, 785 million people live without access to clean water, while a further 2 billion don’t have a decent toilet of their own. With programmes in some of the world’s most remote places, WaterAid exists to address these issues.
The Challenge
Prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, WaterAid had moved most of their technology over to cloud-based solutions and were reaping the benefits of minimal upfront costs, remote access, greater agility, and low-hassle maintenance.
Their phone system was one of the final pieces of the puzzle - a Mitel platform they had been using for years that no longer delivered the flexibility they wanted.
Like most UK businesses, the desire for a unified communications platform became an urgent need when the country entered lockdown in spring 2020. It was crucial that staff could collaborate as effectively from home as in the office. It was also imperative that the Supporter Care Line, who handled a huge number of enquiries and donations, could answer calls promptly and professionally without having to reroute them.
The Solution
Gary Hodgson, IT Product Manager at WaterAid, was one of the team who turned to Focus Group for a solution.
“Microsoft Teams was an obvious choice for us. We had successfully been using it for several months as an inhouse collaboration tool. But in order to make the decisive move away from our legacy phone system, it needed to meet certain criteria. One of these was PCI compliance.
We record calls for quality purposes, but we also take a large number of donations over the phone. To comply with PCI regulations, we needed a solution that could detect when a payment was being entered onscreen and automatically pause the recording until the transaction was complete. It was really a decisive factor in our choice of UC platform, but at the time there were few vendors who could deliver.
We turned to Focus Group because they’d already delivered on a previous project with us. Dan [Ellis], Head of Sales, at Focus got in touch with Chloe [Emm] at Oak Innovation - a long-term partner of theirs who were bringing out a recording solution for Teams. They worked together to fast-track the pause/resume functionality in Clarify so we could have the solution that we really wanted.
From then on in, the training and support from both Focus and Oak was excellence and comprehensive.”
The Results
“Having Teams with Clarify recording has helped us work together better as an organisation and deliver a secure and streamlined service to customers, despite the turbulent period we’ve all experienced. It stands us in good stead whatever the future holds, whether staff are in the office or working remotely.
One of the features our Support Care team like best is how easy it is to call people call back by copying and pasting referral lists. Using voicemails as emails, which are easier to share and store, also saves time. We’ve actually reduced the length of time people are waiting and the number of call backs because it’s so much easier to receive and transfer calls to other departments within Teams.”
For more information:
Focus Group www.focusgroup.co.uk
Oak Innovation Ltd www.oakinnovate.com
