06 November 2023
CarGiant is the world’s largest used car dealership, with a head office, car showroom and processing plant workshop of over 45 acres located in White City, London. Since 1977, CarGiant has sold over 650,000 cars to customers all over the UK. CarGiant has approximately 450 staff divided into sales, customer service, finance, IT, technicians, and administration.
Upgrading end-of-life tech
CarGiant’s on-site expensive telephone system together with ISDN was quickly becoming end-of-life technology.
After a detailed consultation with Spitfire, it became clear that there was an urgent need to move CarGiant to a Unified System that was well suited to all branches and departments. The IT team was also wasting man hours having to manage multiple service providers. One of CarGiant’s main requirements was a Unified System to enable fluid communication between all departments and employees, including the ability to transfer calls internally and communicate between users via extension numbers.
The Unified System had to be both easy to use from an admin perspective as well as from a user perspective. The department that required the most in terms of features was on the customer service side within CarGiant’s call centre. As the department that receives most inbound queries, they had some challenging requests with regards to queuing, incoming calls, messages/chat, and emails. They also wanted social media integration and advanced reporting. In terms of day-to-day functionality, all employees wanted to make use of a softphone/desktop application together with physical handsets, and management and staff wanted to continue using Microsoft Teams as the main form of internal communication.
“What we needed was a way to consolidate our communications services to make managing it all simpler - and that’s exactly what Spitfire has enabled us to do,” said Marcin Slon, IT infrastructure manager, CarGiant.
Unifying the system
Once Spitfire had evaluated the requirements of CarGiant, a solution deployment plan was developed.
Spitfire was able to deploy a Unified System created by two separate systems combined via its AnySIP network. CarGiant’s connectivity and telephony systems were consolidated to make it easy for CarGiant’s IT team to manage more easily. Suitable internet connections were installed across all sites to ensure connectivity for the new IP telephone systems and enable seamless communication between departments and users. For the majority of users, Spitfire installed its 3CX Cloud IP telephone system, a software-based telephone system which met the requirements for reporting, usability, and softphone/desktop apps.
“If we have any issues they are addressed quickly by our account management team,” said Slon.
For CarGiant’s call centre, Spitfire provided SIP Trunks for their Microsoft Teams telephone system managed by a 3rd party IT company, which, integrated with call centre software, was able to provide the email queueing as required. Lastly, as Spitfire had already provided the company with voice-approved data circuits, call quality could be guaranteed for all users with the exception of the call centre as the SBC was hosted in a third party data centre.
With Spitfire, CarGiant has been able to completely modernise its connectivity and telephony infrastructure. The upgrade has enabled CarGiant departments and employees to seamlessly connect with each other. By upgrading its connectivity solution, CarGiant has increased the productivity of its workforce by allowing them to use a new Cloud IP phone system, which simplifies internal communication. In addition, the call centre team can now use key features such as reporting to make the team more efficient when handling inbound calls from customers.
