David Phillips & Partners (DPP) Law Ltd. is home to 60 solicitor advocates, paralegals and support staff, spread across eight offices throughout England. The firm specialises in providing legal services for criminal defence, personal injury, actions against the police, and family law.
A voice service with a difference
DPP Law have been using Spitfire’s PBX phone system since 2016 when the firm relocated. As part of the move, the company’s telecoms provision was also re-evaluated.
“We had been using a PBX phone system located at our old head office, but we took the opportunity to see what was available on the market and evaluated several prospective suppliers,” said Roger Posener, financial controller. “The 3CX system supplied by Spitfire seemed the logical choice based on our research.”
3CX is an IP telephony solution available on both Windows and Linux systems. Spitfire is a 3CX Titanium Partner and supplied the 3CX system hosted in the cloud.
“With the 3CX system we just have a router at each of our offices and IP handsets. Because Spitfire hosts the service there’s no need for servers or other hardware on our premises,” said Posener.
Evolving workplace demands
Of course, back in 2020, the majority of DPP Law’s employees were faced with the challenge of shifting to working from home in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, DPP Law was well prepared for this eventuality.
“We actually pre-empted this shift when we put new systems in place to ensure people could work from home or anywhere, they wanted,” said Posener. “We didn’t have any issues once lockdowns were in force as we were already offering remote working to our employees – which Spitfire enabled us to do.”
Throughout the pandemic, DPP Law’s employees still had to meet clients, attend court, visit police stations. The provision of reliable connectivity at all times was therefore critical. With Spitfire’s solution, staff were able to access 3CX via their smartphones, keeping in touch whenever and wherever was required.
“We had no issues whatsoever. Once the lockdowns came, this transition had already taken place, so the shift was seamless. The only difference was that more people were using 3CX from home,” said Posener.
Indeed, Posener claimed that the greatest benefit of 3CX, particularly during the pandemic, was the softphone app for mobile devices.
“A lot of our staff are out of office at court or meeting clients and the app gives them full access to the 3CX service, exactly as if they were in the office, even if working abroad. This has become even more important in 2020,” said Posener.
Additional connectivity benefits
Another benefit of 3CX is the conference calling capabilities. Previously, DPP Law had subscribed to a third-party conference call service, but with 3CX, a conference call can be set up quickly and easily just by adding additional callers.
Interestingly, the 3CX system uses SIP trunks for Voice over IP (VoIP) telephony instead of conventional ISDN phone lines. Designed as an ISDN replacement, Spitfire’s SIP trunks offer business quality secure telephony at typically up to 50% less than the monthly rental cost of an equivalent ISDN service. Indeed, Spitfire offers a complete end-to-end SIP service via its own IP and TDM infrastructure, without using the public internet. Consequently, Spitfire offers quality of service uptime guarantees on latency, jitter, and packet loss, both upstream and downstream.
“We used Spitfire for all our data connectivity, so we had complete confidence in their ability to support our voice telephony,” said Posener.
Spitfire has provided dedicated private 100Mb circuits at several of the DPP offices, which are used for voice and data. At these locations, the 3CX service is delivered over Spitfire’s own Voice Approved broadband or Ethernet circuits guaranteeing the end-to-end call QoS with guarantees on Latency, Jitter and Packet Loss both upstream and downstream.
“We have never had a major outage of the service. It just does the job for everyone across the firm, no matter where they are located,” said Posener. “Simply put, it has done exactly what it is supposed to.”
Spitfire’s SLAs emphasize fast fault response, as well as sophisticated on-line fault tracking, backed with a ‘Keep Customer-Informed’ policy. This ensures regular updates from a support technician who manages issues to completion. In a recent survey, 90% of respondents said an issue was resolved on first call.
The account management functionality has also been praised by DPP Law, which is provided with a dedicated account manager to discuss any changes or new services required. All in all, Spitfire has fulfilled the brief and satisfied its customer.
“We are very happy with the 3CX service hosted by Spitfire. All our offices are linked using it and our staff are pleased with the range of features, especially the mobile softphone app. It’s exactly what we needed,” concluded Posener.
