Five phone systems that couldn’t call each other

Business

Optical Solutions Australia, a Hexatronic Group company

Sector

Optical network design and distribution

Where

Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra and Perth

Platform

Uniden Voice over Cloud

The business

Optical Solutions Australia designs and distributes optical network infrastructure. Part of the Hexatronic Group, it runs warehouses, trade counters and technical staff across five branches: Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra and Perth.

What was breaking

Five branches, five legacy PBX systems, and no connection between any of them. Each site had been solved individually at some point over the preceding decade, and the result was five correct answers to five separate questions that together made no sense.

• A caller who reached Brisbane but needed Perth was asked to hang up and dial a different number. Some of them did.
• No overflow between branches. One site could have every line engaged while another sat idle, and neither could help the other.
• No shared directory and no presence. Finding a colleague in another state meant knowing their mobile, or knowing somebody who did.
• Internal communication had fragmented into mobiles, email and whatever chat tool each branch had picked for itself.
• Five maintenance contracts, five vendors, five renewal dates and five different people to ring when something broke.

What changed

OSA consolidated all five branches onto a single Uniden Voice over Cloud platform.

• One national numbering and extension plan. Every person in the company has an extension that works from every site.
• Transfers across state lines. Warm or blind, without the caller redialling.
• Queues that overflow across borders. A busy trade counter in Melbourne can be covered by an available one in Brisbane.
• AI-assisted routing and call summaries, so the technical questions reach technical people the first time.
• Chat, video and business SMS in the same app as the calls, which retired the collection of branch-specific tools.
• One contract, one vendor, one support number in place of five.

The result

The operational win is easy to state and was immediate: a caller reaching any OSA branch can now be connected to any person in the company, in any state, without hanging up. The consolidation of five vendor relationships into one removed an entire category of administrative overhead that nobody had ever formally costed.

We spend our days helping customers build networks that connect the whole country, so it never sat right that our own five sites couldn’t put a caller through to each other. One platform changed that overnight.

Mike Thomas, Chief Executive Officer

Why it’s relevant to you

Multi-site businesses very rarely set out to build five disconnected phone systems. They arrive there one reasonable decision at a time, usually because each site solved its own problem in its own year. If that description fits, the cost isn’t the five maintenance contracts. It’s every caller who was asked to hang up and dial another state.

Other case studies

• Coco's Wealth of Health: the shop that answers the phone from anywhere
• Benzina Garage: back on the air in thirty minutes
• Pracbill: when the phone system sells the software

Details and quotations sourced from material published by Uniden Voice over Cloud. View the original. We’ve not independently audited the outcomes described.