About Glen Howells Architects

Launching in 1990, Glenn Howells Architects is a leading UK architectural design studio, with a 140‐ strong creative team delivering innovative projects from offices in both London and Birmingham - all driven by the belief that our physical spaces can make a tangible difference in the lives of both individuals and communities.

Challenges

Like all companies within the architectural sector, Glenn Howells Architects depend on close collaboration between team members to deliver innovative designs that draw on the full scope of their creativity. While their legacy voice system, supplemented with multiple UC platforms, had proven adequate in this regard for some time, the onset of COVID‐19, and the resulting move to remote working, meant that the system was being utilised at a scale that had never been tried before. The system quickly revealed its limitations in this regard, having no softphone capabilities outside of the company VPN, and lacking the capacity to manage the number of team members now connecting to the corporate network via personal devices each day.

Having already established a strong working relationship with Exponential‐e over the years, they were selected as the technology partner to propose and deliver a solution in response to these challenges, ensuring the deployment would be achieved with minimal disruption and ensure the entire creative team could adapt to the new working model straight away.

Solution 

Following a detailed analysis of their requirements, budget, and existing infrastructure, Microsoft Teams Calling, delivered through an as-a-Service model, proved a perfect fit for Glen Howells Architects' immediate and long-term needs.

As a Cloud-based solution, TCaaS was deployed rapidly across their infrastructure, under the supervision of a dedicated project team, who remained in regular contact before and after the deployment process to ensure its success and ensure any concerns could be swiftly resolved.

The project team were very informative, efficient, and successfully delivered a working solution to the agreed timeline. As a client, I felt I had no complaints about the delivery of the solution and support providing during and after the implementation.

Dharminder Grewal, IT Manager - Glen Howells Architects. 

This hands-on support meant that uptake of the new solution across Glen Howells Architects' creative team was achieved extremely quickly, to the extent Teams became their default tool for remote collaboration between both colleagues and clients, completely replacing the previous, disparate selection of UC solutions.

The success of this deployment helped Glen Howells maintain their dynamic creative processes and customer engagement throughout the lockdowns of 2020, while simultaneously enhancing their future agility and scalability, and strengthening their working relationship with Exponential-e. Plans are already in place for further solutions to be integrated into Glen Howells Architects' IT infrastructure, in order to build on these successes.

About Cottsway Housing

Operating across West Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire, Wiltshire and Worcestershire, Cottsway Housing provides and maintains rental and shared ownership properties for more than 10,000 tenants, from single-person flats to family homes.

Challenges

As a company that emphasises the importance of openness and engagement between staff and tenants, Cottsway has always relied on its internal and external telecommunications solutions. However, their legacy PBX phone system, hosted on-site, eventually became challenging and time-consuming to manage. Concerns over this single point of failure were compounded by the difficulty of simultaneously managing Microsoft Teams for internal use. This combination of legacy systems and disparate platforms meant actionable analytics were difficult to achieve, thanks to a lack of oversight of all channels of communication.

Solution 

Exponential-e proposed, designed and delivered a completely new communications ecosystem for Cottsway, utilising Direct Routing with Microsoft Teams, combined with resilient SIP trunking for external calls. This unified solution successfully consolidated Cottsway's telecommunications ecosystem while providing a range of additional tools for both internal and external communications. At the same time, to answer the ongoing need for effective analytics and reporting, Exponential-e's Contact Centre solution was deployed, allowing for all customer communications to be tracked and monitored, providing managers with comprehensive reporting and a real-time overview of customer satisfaction across the entire organisation.

The new choice of communication channels, combined with dramatically improved call quality, had a highly positive effect on Cottsway's overall levels of customer satisfaction, while staff voiced appreciation of the improved level of collaboration between teams, and the volume of high-quality training material that was now accessible online, thanks to the roll-out of automated call recording.

During 2020, and the forced move to a distributed workforce in response to COVID-19, this infrastructure proved invaluable in allowing Cottsway's teams to begin working remotely with minimal disruption, maintaining contact with their tenants through the same channels, with the same high standard of performance.