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OAT faced several challenges before joining Onecom. Looking after 36 academies across the UK, they found that they had high telephone bills across multiple suppliers.
The ageing telephone systems that were in place were also unsuitable for their requirements and expensive to maintain. It was critical for them to have resilient systems in place to manage safeguarding practices.
Onecom now supply all academies with analogue/ digital/SIP lines and manage their call traffic as part of the awarded tender; this was recently extended by 2 years testament to the strength of the partnership.
The new Horizon system enabled the schools to make immediate changes to their phone system at no additional costs. With safeguarding a priority for all schools, each school utilises the mobile app should the main system go down due to an internet fault, meaning parents can always contact the school.
With one supplier contact for any billing, technical or solution resolution, valuable time is saved, enabling the customer to be more efficient. Having a dedicated account manager creates a stable and productive relationship. The technical team are fully familiar with the setup of OAT, and the schools have also built great working relationships with a number of them when they need assistance.
The partnership with Onecom and OAT has led to many positive changes throughout the trust including:
Several members of staff have been inducted with administration training of the portal butthe simplicity of operating this system means the schools have become largely self-sufficient. They can administer their own changes in real-time, which is extremely powerful.
Each school had a project manager or project coordinator assigned to manage the delivery for each site.
This in addition to a dedicated account manager to oversee the whole account, has been a key success factor. The programme has enabled OAT to rebuild ageing solutions from scratch, streamlining the way the schools operate their phone system. New features include an out-of-hours service to enable parents to leave a message, that is emailed to a contact at the school; confidence has been instilled that the schools aren’tmissing important messages.
Having a trusted telecoms partner and a reliable communications platform has made life much easier for staff. Combined with a synonymous tariff set across all the academies, means that management is now slick, streamlined and cost-efficient.
The communication from our account team is very good; we know what is happeningwhich means we can have confidence when updating our internal stakeholders. If we have a query, we know Onecom will take ownership so we don’t have to worry about it.
