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Case Studies

Case Study Key Facts.

Company Name: Cathcart Associates Ltd Sector: Recruitment Company Website: http://www.cathcartassociates.com
Lucid Networks Products and Services: Hosted Business Phone Onsite Business Phone System Hosted Exchange E-mail Business Broadband Web Hosting

Company Profile: Cathcart Associates is a specialist Technical Recruitment Provider, with offices in Edinburgh and Aberdeen, operating both contract and permanent solutions across the full spectrum of IT and Technical Business Consultancy.

The customer requirement -

Phase 1: Cathcart Associates approached Lucid Networks as a startup business, with a need for a business telephone system with a low startup cost, but which would allow them to scale up easily and without throwing away any of their initial investment. As a startup company, in a sector where all staff are using the telephone almost constantly, Cathcart Associates were keen to fix their telecomms costs as far as possible. They also needed the ability to answer calls at either of their offices, have free calls between the offices, and still have voicemail and other call handling features to ensure that customer calls didn't go un-answered.

Cathcart Associates also needed a robust, business-class e-mail system which could be accessed both in and out of the office, on a variety of devices, including “push” e-mail on smartphones, together with broadband internet access at their offices.

Phase 2: A year later, the company had delivered on its ambitious growth plans, and was ready to take on new office space in Edinburgh City Centre which would support their next round of growth in staff numbers. Once again Cathcart Associates trusted Lucid Networks to provide the communications and IT infrastructure which would help deliver their new growth targets.

Services and Results -

Initially, Lucid Networks supplied a Hosted Business Phone service, with Snom handsets, which kept startup costs to a minimum, but also included bundled minutes packages, allowing them to fix the cost of UK landline and mobile calls to a single monthly payment. We provided an Edinbugh (0131) and Aberdeen (01224) telephone number which allowed Cathcart Associates to rapidly set up an office in Aberdeen, without investing heavily in communications equipment before the office had started to generate revenue. The sophisticated call handling features of the Hosted Business Phone system, ensure that calls could be answered at either office, so calls were not lost during busy periods or when colleagues were out of the office.

Our Hosted Exchange E-mail service gives all Cathcart Associates’ staff access to e-mail, shared calendar and contacts through Microsoft Outlook on their desktop and laptop computers, together with “push” e-mail on their wide range of mobile smartphones including iPhone and Android handsets. There’s also the powerful Outlook Web Access interface, which allows them to not only use e-mail, calendar entries and contacts from any computer, but can also allow them to set “Out of Office” responses without being at their desk. This allows their busy staff to be sure that they can always deal with customer e-mails and diary management, even when they’re out of the office, and colleagues in the office are able to reliably schedule appointments for other staff using shared calendar acces.

For phase 2, Cathcart Associates needed us to specify IT and communications infrastructure which would be scalable beyond the traditional upper limits of hosted telephone systems, and would be more resilient than a hosted system to support larger numbers of staff using the system as the company grew. We were also asked to provide consultancy and design services for the new office network.

We specified the Protalk Sark on-site business phone system, which can make and receive calls using both SIP and ISDN, and is fully compatible with the existing Snom handsets, ensuring that Cathcart Associates didn’t need to throw away any of their initial investment.

Using the robust failover features of our SIP trunking service, together with the Sark’s ability to route calls over ISDN or SIP trunks, we were able to provide a fully resilient solution. The system will selectively use either SIP or ISDN depending on capacity, availability and call type, or in the event of a fault with one service or the other, ensuring that calls in and out of the business would always be connected. The system also opens up new opportunities to route calls using a GSM gateway to take advantage of low-cost mobile phone calling packages.

Customer Opinion -

Sam Wason, Principal Consultant at Cathcart Associates said "Lucid Networks have repeatedly provided us with a flexible, scalable business telephone system which gives us low cost calling, while allowing us to work flexibly at several locations. In their pre-sales consultancy they have always ensured that our requirements were fully explored, and that we fully understood the options available to us. After sales, their support and technical expertise has been excellent. We would not hesitate to recommend them to any startup or growing business."

For more information about how we can help your business, please contact us today on 0800 862 0095