Century 21
Leading Nationwide Real Estate company centralizes branch office communications and improves management visibility with Thinking Phone Networks coherent customer communications platform.
Century 21 is one of the largest nationwide real estate companies with branch offices across the US. In 2007, many of the previously independent branches throughout the northeast were re-organized under a new management team. Given the independent origins of the individual offices, this new team was faced with end user and management challenges as they started to connect all these branch locations onto a common infrastructure. Each office had its own phone system, data network, and operations personnel. Century 21 wanted to standardize its communications systems and tie all of the branches onto a common platform. This would provide management with the visibility they needed to run their business while at the same time achieving overall cost savings. A common platform would also lay the groundwork for delivering further centralized application services across all their branches. To standardize and connect their branch offices, Century 21 implemented the Thinking Phone Networks C3, including Connect, Voice, Call Center, and Analytics modules. Now all of their branch offices are connected with a quality of service (QoS) enabled network. They share a common hosted IP PBX where all their users have physical or virtual extensions across their branch offices. Inbound calls are handled more efficiently at a centralized call center, where calls are distributed to agents at the appropriate offices. The Analytics module now provides managers with the realtime and historical visibility into their customer communications that they need to manage their business.
Situation
Century 21 is a nationwide real estate company with branch offices across the US. In 2007, many of the previously independent Century 21 branch offices in New England were re-organized under a new centralized management team. One of the key ideas behind the re-organization was to share resources and use size to create economies of scale in the competitive New England real estate market.
The new Century 21 team faced challenges right from the start. The existing offices from which it was comprised were previously run as independent business units. They each had their own network and telecommunications infrastructure and disparate phone systems. Each office had its own phone numbers and personnel to handle inbound customer calls. The end user agents had an uneven mix of features available to them depending on the local pbx system. In many cases advanced features were not available, such as as voicemail to email integration, and mobile handset integration. Management was similarly challenged as a varied collection of vendors and service providers prevented good integration and visibility across the branches. Something as simple as transferring calls to agents at the branch offices was not possible.
The initial challenge was to connect all of these offices on a standardized communications infrastructure, and centralize operational functions so they could be shared across the branch office locations. Management believed that standardization and centralization would improve efficiency and management visibility. They had a vision of creating a centralized set of services which could be shared by all the branch offices, creating economies of scale for their business.
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"We went looking for a partner that had expertise in data networking, telecommunications, and PBX services. We were impressed right from the start with Thinking Phones ability to support all three types of requirements as a managed service." |
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George Patsio, Group President Century 21 Commonwealth |
Solution
To address these challenges, Century 21 launched an initiative to setup a common data and telecommunications infrastructure and PBX services which would connect all of their branch offices together. What they found out in the marketplace was that it was difficult to find any one partner that could cover all of these requirements. George Patsio, part of the management team at Century 21 says, “We went looking for a partner that had expertise in data networking, telecommunications, and PBX services. We were impressed right from the start with Thinking Phones ability to support all three types of requirements as a managed service.” Thinking Phone Networks C3 provides a hosted communications service which combines data and telecom infrastructure with PBX services and business applications on a single platform.
Thinking Phones established a deployment approach to address Century 21’s needs. The first phase included the deployment of C3 Connect, a QoS enabled data network infrastructure that would be shared for both data and voice needs. C3 Connect employs VoIP technology to provide business grade voice services on a converged data network. This eliminates the need for separate dedicated voice and data connectivity, and allows for the dynamic sharing of capacity between voice and data needs. The critical component was to make sure that the deployed network equipment and network data connectivity to be enabled for Quality of Service (QoS). Proper network QoS ensures that voice traffic always takes priority over data traffic, which is needed to guarantee business grade voice service. Cisco network equipment and QoS enabled circuits were deployed to the Century 21 offices based on Thinking Phones Networks library of QoS network design recipes. These design recipes are “known good” network deployment configurations that have been hardened through years of customer engagements and deployments. The network equipment provides QoS for the LAN environment. The QoS circuits ensure that voice traffic gets priority delivery to the Thinking Phones data centers. This infrastructure lays the foundation for the delivery of hosted pbx and other application services.
With the QoS network in place, the next phase involved deploying the C3 Voice module. C3 Voice is a fully featured hosted IP PBX. End users were equipped with either Polycom IP handsets, or virtual extensions which provide centrally managed voicemail and allow for forwarding to mobile phones. All users have their own personal phone number, virtual fax number, and a 4 digit extension which can be dialed from any of the branches, regardless of location. They also have access to the Thinking Phone Networks web portal where they can manage their settings and configuration. Users have access to all the features of a modern ip pbx including voicemail to email, 3-way calling, ring groups, forwarding, and more. Based on his experiences with the C3 Voice module, George Patsio says, “Our multi-location branch office environment is not easily served by traditional PBX technology. Thinking Phone Networks C3 allowed us to connect all our branches to a common system which has improved our ability to communicate with our customers, and reduced our overall expenses.”
The C3 Call Center module complements the Voice module with call center and advanced voice management functions. Using the C3 Call Center, Thinking Phones helped Century 21 to create a centralized call center to field inbound customer calls for all its branch offices. This call center features 9 distinct call queues, and a group of agents who log in and out of these queues to handle customer calls. Calls are distributed to agents based on availability and a specialized set of routing logic. Call center managers use the Call Center console to get a realtime view of activity in the call center and across their branches. The console also provides a graphical interface for managing the queues and transferring calls to the appropriate destinations.
All of the data generated by C3 modules is stored and made accessible to C3 Analytics. C3 Analytics is a hosted business intelligence capability which pre-integrates communications and application data from the C3 platform. Business users get access to a rich set of management dashboards, relational reports, and advanced analytics which helps them to make business decisions. Century 21 management uses aggregated call reports to get a complete picture of what is happening across their branch offices.
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"Our multi-location branch office environment is not easily served by traditional PBX technlogy. Thinking Phones C3 platform allowed us to connect all our branches to a common system which has improved out ability to communicate with customers, and reduce our overall expenses." |
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George Patsio, Group President Century 21 Commonwealth |
Benefits
By standardizing their data infrastructure and voice services to Thinking Phone Networks C3 , Century 21 created a high quality QoS-enabled network that supports data, voice, and other applications. Connecting all the offices on C3 has greatly improved interoffice communication and laid the groundwork for Century 21’s vision of a set of centralized, common services delivered across their branch offices. Where previously they had many different vendors and bills to manage, now they have one relationship with Thinking Phones, which simplifies day to day management and allows them to focus on their core business.
The end user agents are empowered by the advanced voice feature set which helps them stay in better touch with their customers. The unified voicemail and web portal allow users to stay connected wherever they are, particularly when they are out of the office and using their cell phones. Personal fax to email numbers mean that they don’t have to be tethered to the office fax machine.
Century 21 management enjoys the operational efficiencies they have gained by centralizing operations personnel from the branches to the call center. This led to immediate cost savings through allowing the re-deployment of redundant resources. Centralizing services in the call center has also led to improved lead distribution. Using C3 Analytics, managers can now measure activity levels, and judge the quality of different lead sources and marketing campaigns. Ultimately, this service centralization makes Century 21 more competitive as they employ economies of scale to streamline their business. As Century 21 continues to centralize branch office services, additional C3 modules such as CRM, Support, and Content can be brought online very quickly to support this effort.
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"By centralizing our data and communications infrastructure to the Thinking Phones C3 platform, we have dramatically improved operational efficiency and management visibility across our branches." |
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George Patsio, Group President Century 21 Commonwealth |