City beach saves time and money by replacing an ageing phone system
City Beach partnered with CTI Solutions, Avaya and Macquarie Telecom to make it happen
City Beach a leading youth lifestyle fashion brand, expanded to over 60 store locations and in the process grew out of its ageing phone system. City Beach teamed up with Avaya, CTI Solutions, and Macquarie Telecom to transition to a more agile IP-based telephony system.
City Beach collaborated with CTI Solutions to implement a system that would reduce maintenance costs, scale easily, and be self-managed. City Beach had been running an analogue, exchange-based Spectrum system from Telstra, but switched to an Avaya IP Office Server which can support 50 to 2,000 users. Macquarie Telecom is hosting the primary server, with a redundancy server hosted on-location at City Beach.
While transitioning voice traffic to data network overlays in the head office and warehouse because they had existing fiber connectivity infrastructure, expanding the system to the store network was more challenging. “Macquarie has been brilliant with their engineering – their ability to converge voice and data on the same network, especially when there was only ADSL2 into the store,” said CTI communications consultant Steve Herz.
CTI Solutions went on to win the global “Mid Market Innovation Award” from Avaya showing that is was no ordinary project and they went above and beyond what was required of them.
As a result of the switch, City Beach was able to decrease its monthly operation costs by $8,000 while creating an easy-to-manage collaboration environment. When asked about the feedback from users on the new system, Rhian Greenway, City Beach’s CIO, commented, “…to them it’s really just a new desk phone, over time they time they may take advantage of some of the more advanced features, but the fact it works and provides little interruption is a great win.”
CTI Solutions, Avaya, Macquarie Telecom partnering together was the right joint approach to tackle City Beach’s telephony project which has left it well-placed to continue to grow the business.