Harrison Drury elevates its employee, customer experience with Avaya OneCloud UCaaS

As part of its plan to enhance and simplify communications and collaboration for its solicitors, leading law firm Harrison Drury has created a digital workplace service designed to improve both its employee experience and customer experience, built on the Avaya OneCloud UCaaS platform.

Harrison Drury is based throughout the county of Lancashire, with offices in Preston, Garstang, Lancaster, Kendal and Clitheroe, and advises clients which include multi-million pound organisations, owner-managed businesses and high net worth individuals. Among its specialisms are commercial property, commercial litigation, property litigation, insolvency, and corporate and commercial law.

The company’s mission statement is to “make it possible”, but its legacy communications service, relying on multiple applications and different systems for voice calls and video conferencing, meant that even the most basic task was admin-intensive for users and administrators. This meant that addressing regular complaints about managing these systems took up a lot of time for IT staff – time that could be better spent elevating the business.

The law firm’s lack of satisfaction with the existing phone service came to a head when Covid-19 forced Harrison Drury employees to work from home, complicating the client response process. In a competitive market, the firm’s solicitors were unable to receive and transfer customer calls with the pre-requisite information they needed, such as caller ID, to enable them to react quickly during fast-paced customer transactions.

Reacting to these pressures, the company undertook a reevaluation of its communications needs, working with Avaya ecosystem partner Fortay Connect, a trusted advisor that understood its requirements, provided market insights and optimised the evaluation process.

Following a competitive proposal, Harrison Drury chose RingCentral for its wide list of features and cross-device compatibility.

On return to office working, the firm took the opportunity to look for a modern communications service with the flexibility to support hybrid working and eliminate the complexity of its previous siloed system. The offering was rolled out to 130 users across seven offices.

Through this process, Harrison Drury said that enabled flexible, always-on video conferencing and workstream collaboration to support working from anywhere while reducing business communications costs.

“The simplicity of Avaya Cloud Office has noticeably improved our business capabilities,” said Harrison Drury head of IT Martin Holmes. “Tasks that used to require 10-12 clicks to complete now take two and, after completing some 4,000 calls with the new system, we haven’t had a single query or complaint, relieving IT staff to focus on recording data and analytics.

“What’s more, we now have visibility over which solicitors are busy or which ones are available to take incoming calls, meaning we can reroute calls to ensure they are received,” he said. “As a result, our missed call rate has halved, doubling the number of new business leads. This is a great return on investment, considering our overall communications costs have also shrunk.

“Our previous telephony system involved personalised desktop handsets that required significant reconfiguration for more than one user, which made hotdesking complicated. Minutes and seconds can have a big impact during a major court case, and our previous system took too much time to use and manage.

“With Avaya Cloud Office, our solicitors get a single number that they can personalise and use across mobile, laptop and desktop handsets,” said Holmes. “What’s more, they can log in using a single sign-on on any device and access their unique configuration, enabling them to jump on customer requests from wherever they are and access all the information they need.”