Connectivity
Plumbcare case study: keeping track of costs
With multiple phone systems and spiralling costs, Plumbcare needed help to co-ordinate field staff effectively.
February 10, 2020
5 minutes
Connectivity
Plumbcare case study: keeping track of costs
With multiple phone systems and spiralling costs, Plumbcare needed help to co-ordinate field staff effectively.
February 10, 2020
5 minutes
Three separate contracts for communications were causing confusion and a lack of control over costs.
BT One Phone – A single, hosted phone system that combines the best of mobile and landline features.
Plumbcare can now keep track of engineers who are using up all their data, while also keeping track of costs.
Plumbcare is a specialist team of plumbers and heating engineers looking after homes and businesses in Yorkshire.
Communication between office and remote staff is vital to coordinate support and keep customers happy, especially when it comes to emergency call outs. But with multiple phone systems and spiralling costs, Plumbcare needed help.
With BT One Phone, they found the answer.
The challenge
With around 30 engineers on the road and 10 call handlers in their head office, Plumbcare depends on effective communication. When a call comes in from a customer, the Plumbcare team need to find an available engineer, give them the information they need, and get them to the customer quickly.
The team had been juggling three separate contracts for their landlines, mobile phones and broadband. And Plumbcare were convinced they were paying over the odds.
The solution
When Plumbcare's operations manager, Tom Scott, spoke to us, we suggested BT One Phone – a hosted phone system that sends both mobile and office calls to mobile devices.
By taking BT One Phone, Plumbcare replaced the confusing tangle of separate contracts and bills with a single service (and a single bill). Better still, having one phone that covered both the office and the field meant the transition between the two was seamless.
According to Tom: “BT One Phone meant we only had one bill and one way of managing things.”
Cost and simplicity weren’t the only benefits that Plumbcare found in BT One Phone.
With a single, synchronised directory on every device, it was easy to contact engineers on the move. And where there used to be a hunt group set up for Plumbcare’s planning team, now individual team members had their own number, despite there being an overall reduction in phone lines.
The installation itself was seamless and we didn’t miss any calls. All of our engineers’ SIM cards were transferred without any problems. I couldn’t have asked for more.
“Everyone likes it,” says Tom.
“They like the fact that they can contact anyone from the directory, and the best thing is that it works in the same way as a regular phone system.
“They don’t have the complication of added mobile numbers or different office numbers,” he says. “They can get hold of people with just one push of a button and without having to look them up.”
The result
After a smooth installation that Plumbcare’s customers wouldn’t even notice, everyone was quickly making the most of BT One Phone’s features. And there was a simplified, cheaper bill at the end of it all.
Tom can now keep track of engineers who are using up all their data, and sort things out before it becomes a big problem.
“Instead of running up massive bills, I can limit the amount of data that they’ve got and set up a warning if they reach 80% of their maximum allowance,” he says.
“Before BT One Phone, it wasn’t until we received the bill that we knew anything about it. Now I’ve got the flexibility to look at what people are doing on a day-to-day basis.”
And features like ‘presence’ mean that head office staff can quickly see which engineers are with customers and make sure they’re not interrupted during a critical moment of a call out.
