The London accountancy firm offers a personal, partner-led service to entrepreneurial SMEs, large corporates and high-net worth individuals. However, its business communications processes needed refining to match its clients’ and Partners’ forward-thinking ways and vision of faster, more flexible service.
With the firm’s legacy telephony system cumbersome to use, costly to maintain and difficult to manage, HW Fisher & Company set out to introduce hassle-free, integrated communications technology for streamlined internal and external communications that could support new, efficient ways of working.
IT Director, Tony Blonk explains, “We were holding on to our old system longer than we should have. Maintenance and support costs aside, it didn’t provide the features and functionalities that we now require. Our teams need a choice of tools that help them to deliver business and client services more quickly and that make their work day easier”.
The Solution
Britannic assisted HW Fisher & Company in ascertaining its technology needs in a series of workshops and, guided by the firm’s desired business outcomes, helped define the functional requirements of the new solution. The blend of strategic advice, examples of best practice projects and approaches, and close cooperation has laid the foundation for a productive UC solution and lasting technology partnership.
HW Fisher & Company’s UC solution is built on a Mitel IP platform along with SIP routing through Britannic’s netX SIP exchange platform, and runs across a switched Ethernet network. MiCollab provides extensive collaboration tools.
Mitel
Mitel 3300 ICP gives HW Fisher & Company a single seamless communications solution that is easy to manage. Scalable and future-proof, the platform allows for simple adds, moves and changes as and when required.
MiCollab
The Mitel MiCollab suite is the accountants’ game changer, providing presence, messaging, screen & content sharing, audio, web and video conferencing in one client. A thorough change management plan ensured positive user adoption.
netX
netX SIP exchange achieves cost savings with free internal calls and low-cost external calls, provides resilient routing and allowed the firm to retain existing DDIs. The savings potential was illustrated by an initial financial analysis and infrastructure audit.
Sharing and Collaborating
300 employees across the firm’s London and Watford sites now pick and mix those MiCollab features that help them work most efficiently. They can dial out from their screens, conduct audio and video conferences, send IMs, work on documents together with screen share and take remote control of desktops for effective virtual collaboration. This has simplified administration, elevated collaboration regardless of device and location and shrunk travel time and expenses.
The Results
The new UC environment allows HW Fisher & Company to continue to deliver excellent accounting services in line with client expectations - a strength that, combined with its entrepreneurialism and practice specialisms, puts the firm within the top 25 ranked UK chartered accountancy firms.
“The solution has proved to be a success with positive feedback from staff, who creatively use the collaboration tools to maximise their functionalities”, reports Tony Blonk. “It has prompted innovation amongst teams and it is refreshing to hear staff advising each other on usage, and pushing my team to do more of this. As a result, we have improved communications amongst employees and clients, increasing efficiency and productivity.
Clients have even commented on the new methods and the general improvement in client service, which goes to show that our new solution and approach put us on a par with the kinds of applications our clients like to use”, he concludes.
Service availability percentage
Users collaborate virtually with colleagues and clients
All UC and collaboration features delivered from one robust platform
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