Providing emotional and practical support to over 16,500 carers across Lincolnshire, South and North-West Kent, Medway and the London Borough of Waltham Forest, Carers FIRST provides a wide range of information, advice and support services to people of all ages looking after a relative or friend who could not manage without their help.
Offering everything from access to respite services to welfare benefits advice, emergency planning, and statutory carers assessments, the charity has recently undergone a period of rapid expansion and more than doubled in size.
With call volumes to its non-geographic 0300 number escalating, the charity's existing on-premise telephony and call routing system simply couldn't cope with the growth in demand.
"We were constantly losing connections or fire-fighting issues with regional hubs and satellite offices suddenly unable to receive incoming calls" explains Michele Leach, IT and Compliance Manager at Carers FIRST. "This was frustrating for callers and for our teams - sometimes the only way we knew there was a problem was when a caller contacted a member of staff on their mobile to say the 0300 phone link wasn't working."
As a multi-site organisation that needs to be confident it can direct and respond to calls made to its offices or Carers Hub support teams, Carers FIRST needed to be certain it could deliver the best possible experience for everyone it supports. That means being able to talk to someone on the end of the phone - even during peak demand times.
But that wasn't all. The existing telephony platform was highly inflexible, which meant that if the charity wanted to add new locations or personnel to the system or needed to redirect staff calls to cover holidays, it could take days or weeks to get these changes made.
"We were making at least two or more calls a day to the support desk and were dependent on others to make basic changes to the system - for a fast-moving organisation like ours, that simply wasn't acceptable", continues Michele.
Determined to get a new communications infrastructure in place that would enable the charity to respond better and faster to the needs of the carers it supports, Carers FIRST turned to Focus Group for a solution that would not restrict or constrain the way the charity wanted to work.
