Case Study: Citizens Advice Denbighshire

About Citizens Advice Denbighshire

Providing free, confidential and impartial advice and campaign on big issues affecting people's lives.

Citizens Advice Denbighshire's goal is to help everyone find a way forward, whatever problem they face. As an independent charity and part of the Citizens Advice network across England and Wales.

The network of charities offers confidential advice online, over the phone, and in person, for free. Citizens Advice is independent and totally impartial. In 2019 they helped over 2.8million people.

The Challenge

A legacy ISDN solution was causing issues for Citizens Advice with the change to a more remote working structure. The system did not have the necessary capabilities to allow their 120 users to work remotely, in the face of the pandemic this posed a real problem and threatened their ability to provide the necessary support to people who needed it most.

Not only was the system lacking in the agility that was now required but it was also expensive, something that as a charity Citizens Advice Denbighshire was keen to find an improvement on.

The Solution

After speaking to Atlas Support, several solutions were given to CAB Denbighshire, along with the pros and cons for each. Allowing them to make a decision that was right for the organisation whilst under the expert guidance of Atlas Support Account Manager, Paul Williams.

A switch to SIP and a bespoke cloud-based solution provided the remote working capabilities that CAB Denbighshire required throughout the lockdown period, allowing their 120 strong team to easily work from home and still provide the essential services to support their clients.

With the advanced call handling capabilities of SIP, concerns around call volumes were no longer a worry and with the scalability the solution provides changing needs of the business are easily catered to.

The solutions were provided quickly and with minimum need for onsite visits due to social distancing constraints. Along with remote training for users. With remote and hybrid-working looking to become more common and with concerns around how the pandemic may continue CAB Denbighshire are now looking to include some softphones to further strengthen their remote working solutions.

The Results

CAB Denbighshire has enjoyed many benefits from moving to a new streamlined solution, allowing them to take full advantage of remote working capabilities and faster connection speeds.

Time-Saving: An efficient and high speed connection has saved significant time for routine tasks, particularly where accessing files and stored data is necessary.

Reliability: SIP allows call-handling capacity of up to 10,000 channels and 100 calls per second giving ultimate reliability and protecting the call system from being overwhelmed.

Usability: A simple, user-friendly system has allowed the team to seamlessly transition to remote working without a complicated new system to learn.

Remote Working Capabilities: Cloud solutions allow CAB Denbighshire to work from anywhere, anytime as easily as when they are in the office.

Cost Savings: Scalability and free internal calls offer significant cost savings on telephony.

"There are some parallels between how we advise clients and how Atlas Support find our solutions. Our options and outcomes are clearly laid out by Paul whenever we engage you for work. We never feel pushed towards any single solution due to cost or ease-of-implementation. When implementing solutions or requiring support, Atlas Support know not just the systems they manage for us but also the rest of our systems and how they interact which is a great achievement when considering the number of accounts that must be managed. The integration of services has also allowed us to have a one-stop solution for our telecoms and other required work such as networking." - Simon Jones, Research and Operations Officer, Citizens Advice Denbighshire