Christopher Rodgers & Associates is a nationwide firm of Chartered Surveyors and Architects. The requirement for a replacement telephone system in their National Operations Centre was largely motivated by the need to alleviate call pressure in the increasingly busy Survey Department. They also wished to replace their existing voicemail system with a solution that could offer further capacity and functionality. Incom Business Systems arranged for the provision of an increased number of digital lines and DDI numbers and installed an Aastra Ascotel telephone system with an 8 port voicemail / auto attendant, incorporating Ascotel's Unified Messaging platform.

As a forward thinking company, Christopher Rodgers & Associates were already heavily utilising voicemail and email during their day to day communications and were therefore in an ideal position to take full advantage of the benefits offered by Ascotel Unified Messaging. The unified messaging platform integrates with the programs Microsoft Outlook® or Lotus Notes® to allow management of voicemail, fax and email from a single message centre on the desktop computer. Voice and fax messages are listed in your "inbox" along with emails and all three message types are dealt with using a common set of management tools. Senior staff at Christopher Rodgers & Associates were already in the habit of accessing their voicemail messages remotely by dialling into the system. With unified messaging they have increased this functionality and now have the option to have emails "read out" to them by the system.

Emails, voicemails and faxes are presented to the user from one message centre thereby improving efficiency.

All messages can be organised into specific folders, forwarded or deleted etc using a common set of management tools.

Users have a visual interface to their voice mailbox and the ability to play and record messages over the telephone or over sound-equipped PCs.

Users can access their messages remotely via telephone and may choose to listen to their e-mail messages using text-to-speech conversion.

Remote users can forward their faxes or emails to a fax number wherever they are.

Increasing the number of lines and voicemail ports at Christopher Rodgers & Associates provided enough capacity for the voicemail / auto-attendant to be programmed to act as an "operator overflow". Call traffic to the Survey Department had been steadily escalating and the aim was to reduce the number of calls receiving an engaged tone and to ensure a professional response to incoming callers without having to employ additional reception staff. When all operators are busy, additional calls are now answered by the auto-attendant, held in a queue and played an intermittent comfort message which gives them the option to hold, dial an extension number, or leave a message. Once an operator becomes available, the queuing call will ring on their extension, alerting them that it has transferred from the auto-attendant. This further improves customer service as the operator is able to answer the call with, "Thank you for calling Christopher Rodgers & Associates, sorry to have kept you waiting."

Another feature which was programmed specifically for Christopher Rodgers & Associates' requirements was the option for reception staff to transfer calls to queue on certain extensions in particularly busy departments. The caller could therefore be routed to the relevant person's extension and given the option of holding or leaving a message in their personal mailbox. This allowed reception staff to release calls to the appropriate extensions leaving them available to deal with the next incoming call. Call traffic on reception was further alleviated by increasing the number of DDIs, allowing callers to directly dial any staff member or department.