Royal London Insurance will save £600,000 a year by switching its
mobile staff to a unified communications solution.
Royal London manages £30bn in funds and specialises in sending
financial consultants to customers' homes. Last year the company
issued mobile phones to its 1200 representatives and found its
phone bills soaring as staff set up call forwarding services.
Call Sciences' unified communications system will allow each
financial consultant to use a Web interface to set up to five
chained call redirects.
As a call comes through on the special 07092 number set aside by
Oftel for unified communications, the Call Sciences datacentre
pushes it to each telephony device, without requiring any
additional premium services from the network carrier.
The system does not eliminate all call redirection charges. Calls
from mobile phones that are not on the Royal London carrier
networks will still incur redirect charges. However, the insurance
firm believes that as few of its customers call its representatives
from mobile phones, any interconnect charges will be significantly
less than call redirect charges.
Unified messaging providers have had a rough year, with Vivao and
Canbox both calling in the receivers. However, Call Sciences
managing director Piers Mummery said: "This is one of the largest
deals this year and a good example of how companies can make
savings by circumventing the hidden charges carriers place on
interconnect and redirection services.
"We expect that, as more companies switch away from fixed to mobile
telephony and teleworking continues to rise, telecommunication
managers will need to find a solution to reduce the these
unpredictable charges."
Mummery, who is also the European Director for the Unified
Communications Consortium added: "Telecommunication companies make
substantial revenue on redirection and interconnect charges and
have a vested interest in keeping the status quo. Companies trying
to reduce telecommunication charges should look a bit more closely
at its bills to see if they are also being hit by these types of
charges."
Unified communication services received bad publicity earlier this
year, when Oftel issued a warning about unscrupulous operators
using the number range that was originally designed for unified
numbering for premium rate services. To combat this, Oftel revoked
revenue sharing rules that allowed third parties to profit from
these scams on 1 November.