Be Wiser

The Background

Be Wiser Insurance is an independent insurance broker regulated and approved by the FCA. It is one of the fastest growing personal lines brokers in the UK and has over 700 members of staff.

The company has been listed in the Sunday Times Fast Track 100 for three years in succession, one of only a handful of companies to achieve this. Acting for the majority of the largest UK-based insurance companies its mission is to get the best insurance policy at the best price for each individual client, with over 200,000 to date.

The Challenge

Elite Group has been in partnership with Be Wiser since 2007, when we installed its original Nortel telephone system for approximately 40 users. The original installation covered all wholesale line rental services, outbound calls, all connectivity services including Layer 2 leased lines through to basic DSL and all their non-geographic inbound numbers.

Since 2007 the system had been successfully maintained through a number of application upgrades and the number of extensions grew to over 600. However, by 2015 Be Wiser had outgrown its original infrastructure, and Nortel had also been acquired by Avaya, who were ending support of that particular system. Additionally, the business had grown to cover five sites in Andover and a call centre in Swindon.

Be Wiser engaged Elite Group to review, design and install a platform that would:

• Connect the Swindon office to its internal network.
• Expand with future growth of the contact centre.
• Provide a hardware-based solution rather than a cloud-based one.
• Provide for inbound call queuing to allow efficient call handling, and maximise agent time, so providing an improved end customer experience.
• Provide access to on-line call reporting and the ability to self- manage the call queuing requirements instantly, including for DR.
• Apply network call recording to both inbound and outbound calls to aid in training and dispute resolution.

The Solution

As Elite Group is not tied to any one partner or supplier we were able to show-case a number of alternative solutions across a range of technologies.

Be Wiser and Elite considered and scored a number of options together to arrive at the best solution. After detailed product workshops and supplier presentations we decided that Avaya offered the best fit in terms of functionality, scalability and ease of migration.

The solution elements included:

• Implementing a resilient MPLS connection for SIP delivery and connecting the Swindon site.
• Implementing a centralised internet breakout with UTM.
• Upgrading the telephony platform to Avaya Communication Manager SIP environment.
• Upgrading the Avaya Aura Contact Centre (AACC) for SIP integration.
• Introducing SBC PSTN SIP trunk capabilities.
• Moving existing ISDN primary rate PSTN TDM trunking over to a newly provisioned PSTN SIP trunk service, centralising all PSTN traffic at the ACM core, with delivery integrated via SIP session border controllers.
• Upgrading voicemail to Avaya Aura Messaging (AAM).
• Installing a new Redbox Call Recording Solution.

Elite Group installed the new phone system with contact centre capabilities, onsite hardware call recording; and replaced Be Wiser’s existing connectivity with MPLS via the Elite Group core network across six sites. This involved migrating from ISDN to SIP and porting all numbers and re configuring inbound estate.

The Results

Be Wiser is now benefiting from:

• A more stable and scalable telephone system.
• A higher capacity data network which is more resilient.
• Call recording that is FCA compliant.
• Cost savings on SIP when compared to ISDN.
• The company is fully IP enabled and future-proofed.
• Over 700+ licences, for which the migration and implementation was completed seamlessly and on time.

Since the completion of this project Elite Group has been engaged by Be Wiser to implement a number of IT services including a LAN switch infrastructure refresh, Veeam backup server project and an Exchange email migration project.