Liberty Living

Liberty Living now receives dedicated account management and relishes a reduction in their communications expenditure thanks to the Focus Group team.

About Liberty Living

Liberty Living PLC manages student and key worker accommodation. Working in conjunction with universities and other representative bodies, they provide modern, stylish and affordable accommodation to the growing student population in the UK.

The challenge

Many of Liberty Living's sites only have one or two users, and a big issue they had was finding a system which cost-effectively allowed these users to have the same features and functions as the larger sites.

Liberty Living also needed a solution that solved their other pain points, such as being cost-effective in installation and maintaining, and allowing head office to transfer calls back and forth to all sites.

Liberty Living PLC approached Focus Group as their current telecoms provider for call charges and line rentals to tender for a new telephone system across all of their 51 sites to include 125 users. This tender was published to many UK service providers who also submitted solutions.

The solution

Focus Group's hosted telephone system allowed the single users to have access to all of the same features as the larger sites; auto-attendant, mobile twinning, call recording and voicemail to email, with single sites with one line used to have their lines always engaged.

With our solution, if the user is on a call and another call comes in, that call is re-routed to another site to be handled instead of receiving an engaged tone. The hosted system allowed Liberty Living to maintain everything from head office on a single web-based platform.

If a user was moving from one site to another, they simply take their handset with them. Before, Liberty Living had to install new lines and call forward to retain numbers. Halfway through the project, it became apparent that a new office would be opening up in Geneva. This however was no problem with the hosted system, as it was easy to add an additional site and configure the handsets to route calls back to the UK.

The results

Liberty Living reduced their communications expenditure by 27.9%, along with consolidated billing and a single point of contact with dedicated account management. Business continuity was achieved by way of our inbound products and porting numbers to the SIP trunks, with further savings on rental and call forwarding costs achieved.

"Focus Group has given a more cost-effective solution that's backed up by exemplary customer service. Alongside maximising savings, they've ensured we're well prepared for any eventuality - that includes keeping our helpline services up and running should disaster strike."