16 October 2016

Teach First, a charity working to tackle educational inequality in England and Wales, has 11 offices and 650 staff. 

With the decision to move its London HQ from the South Bank to North Greenwich, it sought to replace the different conventional phone systems at each of its offices with a single UC platform that would support Skype for Business. And it had to integrate with Microsoft products, particularly as the charity is a dedicated user of Office 365.

Teach First discussed its needs with VIA, part of Smart Hosted Solutions, based in Nottingham, which suggested its cloud-based product, VIA Voice. The charity visited Redbridge College to see VIA Voice in use and, after a month-long trial at its Birmingham office, rolled out VIA Voice across all of its offices.

VIA director Alex Tebbs says: “Our management portal ensured we could phase the rollout and divert incoming calls temporarily whilst the new numbers were being sent out. This prevented any downtime during the installation process.”

Now Teach First staff can stay in touch with a variety of devices, such as landlines, smartphones, PCs, and tablets. All users have dial in and out conferencing as well as DDI numbers, and Teach First has also implemented VIA’s call routing to ensure callers are connected to the most suitable department.

According to the vendor, Teach First will save about £20,000 a year on direct costs, including service charges, maintaining equipment and call costs. And it says the charity will also make significant indirect savings due to efficiency gains through hot desking, the ability for staff to communicate better when working remotely, reduced travel, enhanced video conferencing, and greater overall workforce collaboration.

Employees were provided with Jabra Evolve 65 headsets which offer both USB and Bluetooth connectivity. Meanwhile, Teach First also ordered 40 Polycom Trio 8800s, the certified Skype for Business conference phone, for its meeting rooms and open office areas.

Mark Sutton, IT director at Teach First, says: “We required a solution that would allow us to modernise our telephony infrastructure, whilst benefiting from a joined-up approach to communications.

“We have already noticed that employee communications have improved, especially between different offices. These efficiency gains will lead to both direct and indirect cost savings, allowing us to focus on our vision of a day when no child’s educational success is limited by their socio-economic background.”