About Crewe Alexandra
League One football club Crewe Alexandra, in Cheshire, employs around 100 staff. Onecom has been its official communications partner for several years, providing fixed line, mobile and broadband connectivity. The club depends on strong relationships with supporters, so ease of communication – whether staff are working from home or the office –- is a vital component of its success.
The Challenge
Powells has been a Onecom customer for a decade, at first for business mobile and then selecting Onecom in a tender process to supply combined desktop and landline connections through the Vodafone One Net service, a secure cloud-based phone system designed to connect landline and mobile communications.
During the pandemic, as staff worked from home, Powells was in need of a seamless and resilient solution so its teams could communicate with customers and each other more easily in lockdown.
The system is reliable and it just works – you don’t have to worry about it at all. We get quite a few offers from businesses that would want to be our communications partner and we say no – you can’t touch Onecom because we love the superb service we get from them!
The Solution
Vodafone One Net is a versatile “virtual landline” system ideal for a wide range of business environments. It is also a viable solution for businesses that will need an alternative for ISDN lines, which are due to be discontinued by BT in 2025.
For Crewe Alexandra FC, One Net enables calls to be seamlessly picked up from a Cisco desktop phone or smartphone wherever the recipient of the call happens to be. The club has 40 mobile users and more than 70 active numbers, including landlines and hunt groups. Onecom supplies a mix of Samsung and Apple smartphones, depending on the preferences of users. One Net works across these and makes the supporter experience seamless, as callers can use a single number with no distinction between a landline or mobile call.
The Result
While other businesses struggled to stay in touch with their customers, Crewe Alexandra FC’s staff were still able to take calls from day one of lockdown and continue to do so during the various stages of restrictions. James Beckett, Head of Commercial at the club, says: “The world of football shut down overnight and everyone got sent home – we had to adapt quickly. We were getting calls about the effect on conferences, events, weddings and ticket refunds – and having One Net in place meant we were able to deal with them directly from home without scrambling to come up with a solution to divert calls to mobiles.
“When restrictions started to ease and football was happening again, we had to continue to be flexible as we were in for matchdays and events and at home for the rest of the time. Just being able to always be at the end of the phone, on a reliable system, was so important – it enabled us to still be the ‘voice of the club’ despite everything that was going on.”