The Challenge: Inflexible, limited communications
To support the business, ORIX deployed a number of office-based PABX systems from over six different vendors for on-premises phone, contact center, Microsoft Teams, and telco contracts. While these solutions served staff well for a significant period of time, they were no longer able to provide the level of flexibility and support that was required. Indeed, the on-premises contact center solution lacked integration into their Salesforce CRM solution and had very limited reporting.
“The PABXs were very dated and becoming increasingly expensive to manage and maintain,” says Tim Clarke, ORIX’s Senior Manager, Technology Operations. “Also, they could not offer many of the features we needed to roll out across our operations.” There was no way to transfer calls between office locations, and queuing of incoming calls was inflexible and difficult to use. Staff working remotely also had to deal with a reduced feature set.
“We did have some softphones in use by mobile workers, however this system could not connect to the office PABXs, which limited its usefulness. We knew it was time to find a full replacement telephony system.”
The Solution: A consolidated, cloud-based system with one vendor
ORIX’s IT team scoured the market for viable alternatives to the ageing PABXs and desk phones. They evaluated a number of options and compared feature sets against their specific requirements. “After close examination of some shortlisted options, we decided to deploy a voice telephony system from 8x8,” says Clarke.
8x8 consolidates ORIX’s disparate systems into one cloud communications solution that enables the organization to have its voice, collaboration, conferencing, and contact center systems all with one vendor. This greatly simplified the management of the company’s communications infrastructure.
8x8’s cloud-based, unified communications solution, 8x8 Work, supports ORIX’s entire operations with collaboration and video conferencing to staff in all locations. Employees can access the platform via a desktop PC or a mobile smartphone and use all of the features that they would normally have in the office when working from home or while traveling. During the COVID-19 pandemic, this helped to minimize disruption to the business.
8x8 Contact Center supports over 50 agents to provide advanced analytics that can drive exceptional customer service, as well as quality management and workforce management to optimize agent performance.
In addition, the deployment includes 8x8 Voice for Microsoft Teams for New Zealand-based agents who were already using Teams. These users can continue to use their favorite collaboration tools while also taking advantage of enterprise-grade telephony without having to leave their Teams application. This means less time switching between applications and improved productivity.
“Minimal staff training was required as the 8x8 interface is very intuitive to use,” says Clarke. “We ran it in parallel with our existing system for a short period to ensure it was operating properly before finally decommissioning the PABXs.”
The Benefits: Reduced wait times, greater capacity, lower costs
Once implementing 8x8, ORIX quickly realized some significant benefits for the business. Incoming calls can now be queued on a national basis and then handled by different offices as capacity becomes available, reducing customer wait times and stress on staff who had been facing high call volumes. “We can also now easily transfer calls between offices, which makes operations much more flexible,” says Clarke. “This helps to resolve queries more rapidly and removes the need for customers to make multiple calls to different locations.”
ORIX has been able to extend its business hours to take more customer calls. Once the east coast offices are closed for the day, calls are transferred to Perth on the west coast for a couple more hours. Similarly, calls can also be diverted away from locations that are closed for a public holiday.
The company has also seen costs go down. “With the complexity of our previous PABX platforms, we had multiple contracts with external parties to provide updates and support. These have now been removed,” says Clarke. “8x8 allows us to quickly set up new users ourselves without technical support, giving each office more flexibility and easier scalability.
