London Overground Rail Operations Ltd (LOROL), which is a 50/50 joint venture between John Laing (owners of Chiltern Railways) and MTR of Hong Kong, was selected in November 2007 by Transport for London (TfL) to run trains and 35 stations in and across the capital.
Both MTR and Chiltern Railways, have a reputation for delivering top quality customer service, and their intention for the London Overground, on TfL’s behalf, is to continue delivering that service and make staff, passengers and London feel proud.
As a newly established company LOROL needed a new phone system implemented quickly and cost effectively in their new headquarters in Swiss Cottage, North London with a view to install further systems at a depot in Willesden and other offices in Camden and their 35 other stations.
The Challenge
LOROL have over 100 staff, at their main offices in North London, and communicating on the phone to other departments as well as third parties and suppliers such as Network Rail and Tfl is a major aspect of the work.
LOROL is an expanding, innovative company offering a service based on efficiency, customer satisfaction and reliable technology. They required a scalable, cost effective communications solution that both mirrored and enhanced those attributes. Additionally the system should seamlessly interoperate with other departments’
Furthermore due to requirements from the rail industry, LOROL required a call recording facility that automatically recorded all incoming and outgoing calls at the Control Centre. So if any incidents were to occur, LOROL could easily review, store and share any calls that were made on any particular date.
Most importantly however, the rail firm needed the solution to be installed and ready to go as quickly as possible.
LOROL spoke to selected telecoms providers to ascertain the time and cost that was needed.
These included a large national telecommunications provider and Jeran Technology, a Voicenet Solutions reseller.
The Solution
LOROL quickly decided to go with Jeran Technology and Voicenet Solutions’ fully hosted VoIP solution VNcomplete. This is an all in-one pure VoIP package which is priced per-user, per-month over the entire contract.
There were three significant reasons for opting for this solution. Firstly it was soon felt that the traditional option of a PBX was cost prohibitive and systems with upfront hardware costs were deemed far too expensive. Plus the cost for Call recording was within the budget. A quote given to LOROL by another telecoms company was deemed uncompetitive and the difference from Voicenet Solutions’ quote was a “significant amount”.
Secondly the installation time was a major factor in making the final decision. Again the other large telecom companies could not compete on this aspect, offering more complex installation procedures and taking a much longer period over it. Voicenet Solutions offer was regarded as straight forward and cost effective. Once the external BT line was secured in the new offices, Voicenet Solutions could get on with the full installation. The start to finish was about 6 weeks, with the critical tasks being the installation of the leased line and the fail-over ADSL.
Thirdly LOROL were impressed by the level of technology and the array of features available, as standard. The flexibility and enhancement of workforce communications with the solution really stood out. Employees were given the ability to be more flexible with where they worked either within the office (hot desking) or at home, whilst still taking calls on their office system.
The Outcome
LOROL now have over 100 Cisco phones and a fully operational Hosted VoIP telephone solution installed in their headquarters. Due to the nature of Hosted VoIP more phones can be added as the company expands, and new features can be added when they are required or become available.
Furthermore Call Recording, Phone Manager and the ability to control where the user can listen to his voicemail, were all features highlighted of great benefit by the client.
LOROL Customer Comment
Voicenet Solutions were able to give us a cost effective, flexible and straightforward solution fully equipped with the very latest VoIP features and with extremely high resilience. LOROL now has a telecoms solution that enhances employee communications and enables us to therefore work smarter. We are looking at the possibility of expanding the communications network offered by Voicenet Solutions into other departments, depots and across our stations in London. I would definitely recommend Voicenet Solutions and Jeran Technology to any other business.
Gareth Murphy Head of IT, London Overground Rail Operations Ltd
LOROL - www.lorol.co.uk
http://www.voicenet-
