The limitations of legacy 

Like many organisations, Exeed had a trusty PBX which provided good service for 18 years - but Managing Director Justin Tye says the business sought a modern cloud based alternative. The legacy PBX had limitations, as representatives located across the country weren’t linked by a single phone system.

“This made routing calls coming into head office to people in Christchurch or elsewhere unwieldy, and similarly, routing to a mobile just didn’t work very well,” said Simon Tabrum, Exeed Cloud Business Manager.

Simplicity and Reliability

Tye says Exeed looked at multiple systems and solutions, but specifically wanted simplicity along with reliability. “Many systems are feature rich and more suited to a contact centre or sophisticated needs. With ours being a relatively simple IVR process directing callers to the right party, we needed something which would enable that without any fuss.”

Seeing the COVID-19 lockdown on the horizon galvanised Tye into action. “The question was simple: how fast can we install? Usually these things take some time and a bit of work, but it was all done in literally three days, start to finish, with the setup of our IVR structure, call grouping, messaging.”

“When we approached Kordia and said, ‘we want to integrate voice into Teams ahead of the lockdown’, it was just a matter of expanding the Proof of Concept by adding capacity, setting up a back end, then rolling it out to groups.”

Seamless Integration

Exeed turned to Kordia as the voice network provider for mycloudcalling, as it was critical that the solution be built on a reliable and robust network. Kordia provided SIP trunks and Direct Routing into Microsoft Teams.

In addition, Kordia’s best connected strategy means that Exeed and its customers also have access to a range of connectivity options to ensure all their Microsoft applications are on-net providing the best possible performance and end user experience.

A Connected Enterprise

With mycloudcalling fully integrated into Microsoft Teams, Exeed staff working from home were ready to take incoming calls on the device of their choice. “What’s key is that we’re now a distributed distributor. Because Teams works across multiple devices – smartphones, PCs, Apple devices and Android tablets – users can choose which works best for them,” said Tye.

In some instances, notes Tabrum, a discrete device is better, so taking a call on a smartphone while typing into a laptop is more convenient. “There’s flexibility from that point of view. There’s also the flexibility of provisioning as much or as little capacity required depending on the circumstance,” added Tabrum.