House & Home Care Limited is a debt management company that helps people struggling to keep up with their contractual payment agreements. H&HC renegotiate contracts with the creditors on their customer’s behalf and put in place an affordable payment plan that is managed by them on a monthly agreement.

House & home care came to Blaze Networks with a requirement for both a highly expandable network and a telephony system that would integrate into their debt management system. This was all required for their new call centre opening in Stockport within three weeks time. Blaze recommended an IBM server backbone running Microsoft Windows 2003 server with Microsoft Exchange 2003 for email. An SQL server was also proposed so that their internal debt management system could be run from the same IBM backbone. This offered relentless reliability for the local systems. In addition to this Blaze Networks proposed a ShoreTel telephony system that could expand at the rate that house and home care required. The Director of the company was very interested with the workgroup functionality that came as standard with the ShoreTel system. He also liked the fact that the auto attendants came as part of the system with no additional costs attached. The final decisive decision maker for the director was the TAPI integration that would work out of box. This gave his staff the ability to have the ShoreTel system configured to work with not only outlook for calendar and contact integration but to have their own internal system configure to popup with customer information as calls where processed. Not only that the ShoreTel system was able to dial their customers from their debt management system at any point in time.

As well as the above being proposed Blaze also offered the following technology in their installation package; Symantec AntiVirus used to protect both servers and PC units from malicious internet viruses adware and spyware. Symantec Backup Exec + Blaze online data backup was used to backup all company data including their own internal debt management system. A Juniper firewall was used to protect company data from malicious attacks from the internet and also allow remote sales employees access to the mail system and company documentation. An unsupported power supply manufactured by APC offered 2 hours of power runtime for the servers and telephony equipment in the event of power loss at the call centre. A Panasonic document centre was implemented for scanning printing and faxing office documentation and as well as this the Microsoft fax service was installed to route incoming faxes to a centralized email account. Lenovo Dual Core Intel based PC’s with 19” widescreen monitors where used for the desktop environments. Plantronics WIFI headset gave staff the ability to roam around the office whilst still being able to collect calls from their desks.

Home & Home care now reaps the benefits of using the complete Blaze networked solution.

“Blaze Networks where fantastic from the start of the project to finish, every aspect of the implementation was done to my exact specification. The time scale was tight and Blaze really came through for us. The IP telephony system that they installed is fantastic; it has brought real efficiency to our call processing model. I would recommend the Blaze ShoreTel system to any who runs a call centre environment.” 

Chris Lyons Director Home & Home Care