Streamlining communications and boosting customer service quality

Hefty hourly rates and paper-intensive procedures can make obtaining legal advice and guidance a burdensome process. Established in 2014, Sydney-based commercial law firm LegalVision is focused on changing this situation. Serving businesses from small start-ups to large corporates, the firm’s 110 staff provide a portfolio of services from business structuring and compliance to litigation and dispute resolution.

The Challenge

In early 2018, LegalVision’s management team realised it faced a challenge. Strong growth and increasing numbers of new clients were putting a strain on the existing telecommunications infrastructure.

LegalVision Chief Technology Officer Evan Tait-Styles says the firm had been relying on a fleet of Cisco desk phones running on a BroadSoft communications platform supported by the Engin hosted VoIP platform. Tait-Styles says frustration was also increasing when it came to technical support for the telecommunications platform.

“While this had worked for us in the past, as the company grew the platform’s limitations were causing issues,” he says. “We had only constrained ability to route incoming calls to different teams and managers had little to no oversight of how contact centre agents were performing.”

Tait-Styles says LegalVision makes extensive use of its web presence to attract prospective new clients who are encouraged to phone for further information. As a result, there is a high level of inbound calls that must be answered in a timely manner by the firm’s Growth Team. The team also makes large numbers of outbound calls in response to potential clients who have entered their details on the website.

“As a company, we have a very strong focus on delivering the best possible customer experience. We felt the voice platform we had was holding us back from achieving this,” he says.

The Solution

In early 2018, a decision was made to find a new platform to support the firm’s growing requirements. An external consultant was engaged to review business requirements and scope out options. After thoroughly assessing a short list, a decision was made in mid-2018 to deploy 8x8.

“There were a number of factors that made the 8x8 solution stand out for us,” says Tait-Styles. “As a company, we have a cloud-first policy and so the fact that 8x8 is a fully hosted service made it very attractive.”

After selecting 8x8, the firm undertook a staged rollout beginning with Unified Communications that went live in October, 2018 for 85 staff. This was followed by 8x8’s Cloud Contact Centre in November which was put to use by 25 members of the Growth Team.

“The third phase, started in early 2020, involved adding video conferencing capabilities via 8x8 Video Meetings,” says Tait-Styles. “We had planned to roll this out gradually in March but had to shorten the timeline due to the COVID-19 crisis.”