Hays: Hiring BT as a trusted service consolidation partner is rewarded with assured reliability and cost reductions of up to 25 per cent

Five-year BT Featurenet deal, along with BT Accumulate and BT Conferencing, sees Hays slash comms costs by up to a quarter

Years of change at global recruitment group, Hays, had left an unreliable UK voice network using products from different suppliers.

Ivor Bryant got the job of sorting it out. It didn’t take long to see the sense of consolidating services with BT. A five-year BT Featurenet contract, with BT Conferencing and a BT Accumulate discount package, restored order.

Meanwhile, BT Conferencing services are used for most meetings. The travel reductions save money, boost productivity, and help Hays reduce its carbon footprint.

We estimate total expenditure on our voice infrastructure has been reduced by 20 to 25 per cent. To have achieved such significant savings with a trusted communications partner gives us the best of both worlds.”
- Ivor Bryant, Telecoms Commercial Specialist, Hays

A leading global recruitment group, Hays in the UK has 3,500 staff across 185 sites. After years of change the company’s voice network had become complex, with products and services from a number of different suppliers. At many sites, calls were being routed away from BT in pursuit of lower call costs, but that led to unreliability.

Hays chose BT Featurenet hosted voice services to consolidate its UK voice communications under a five-year deal.

At fifteen small Hays sites, Featurenet uses IP telephony to provide the capabilities of a dedicated PBX without the cost of a physical switchboard. At other Hays sites, BT routes calls via existing PBXs over Featurenet, saving money on call charges. Hays can also transition to a fully converged IP-based communications network later.

Ivor Bryant, Telecoms Commercial Specialist at Hays, explains: “BT Featurenet lets us take advantage of the cost benefits and simplicity of hosted voice technology with minimum upfront investment and technological change.”

In addition to voice services, in the UK BT provides Hays with an IP Connect wide area network, and local area networks under a separate contract.

Meanwhile, BT Accumulate consolidates Featurenet, ISDN, and PSTN calls and lines expenditure across the UK sites. Hays also gets a 17 per cent discount on business exchange line rental by committing to spend £1 million per year with BT. Hays increased the level of discount it receives by bringing other call traffic back to BT.

The spend committed to BT Accumulate also counts towards calls packages such as BT Business Plan for additional savings. Whereas most call discount packages only include the cost of the calls, BT Accumulate allows Hays to use its total spend across the broadest ever range of BT products and services to get a bigger discount.

With BT Featurenet call costs have been significantly reduced. Consolidated call data is provided to Hays on a single bill via BT OneBillPlus, simplifying payment and providing a clear overview of the whole voice network.

With a large organisation like ours, communications requirements develop and things get overlooked,” says Ivor Bryant. “Billing Analyst is very good at alerting us to any changes required. For example, lines that are no longer being used, or the need for more capacity at a particular site.”

Services from the BT One Conferencing portfolio offer further efficiencies. The majority of day-to-day internal meetings now use BT MeetMe. The resulting travel reductions make the business more efficient while reducing Hays’ carbon footprint.

With total expenditure on its voice infrastructure reduced by an estimated 20 to 25 per cent, Hays knows it’s made the right choice in BT.

• BT Featurenet, ISDN and PSTN voice solution.
• BT Accumulate.
• BT OneBillPlus and BT Billing Analyst.
• BT Conferencing audio and web conferencing services.
• IP Clear MPLS-based WAN.