Case Study: Waterford Adopts SIP System

In 2009, Waterford Crystal became part of WWRD Holdings Limited, a formation of Waterford, Wedgwood and Royal Doulton. The WWRD group is the leading provider of luxury home and lifestyle products worldwide. WWRD products are distributed through premium department stores, independent retailers and wholesalers around the world, including the United States, United Kingdom, Japan, Canada, Australia and Ireland.

The Waterford Crystal Company was originally established in 1783 near the harbor town of Waterford, Ireland. The House of Waterford Crystal in Waterford City, Ireland, opened in June 2010 and represents the largest display of Waterford Crystal anywhere in the world and preserves centuries of heritage, tradition and craftsmanship.

The Challenge. The House of Waterford Crystal includes a state-of-the-art manufacturing facility, visitor center and retail experience store as well as tours year round. Not only does this location generate a lot of foot traffic, but also a lot of voice traffic with visitors from all over the world requesting information about the facility and its crystal products.

In order to accommodate the vast number of visitors and still offer exceptional customer service, The House of Waterford Crystal required a communication solution that would provide superior voice quality, in addition to seamless integration between all WWRD locations, including the corporate headquarters in Wall, N.J.

WWRD recognized the cost savings, convenience and efficiency that network communication between WWRD locations would offer. To this end, it needed a solution that afforded extension dialing, call transfer, call forward and the ability to utilize a centrally located operator if necessary. Furthermore, WWRD desired the ability to take advantage of existing data infrastructure to eliminate long-distance and international dialing costs.

The Solution. To reach its goal of seamless communication amongst all its locations, WWRD chose Teltronics, a vendor that previously supplied its communications platform and contact center solutions. This time, the company selected Teltronics Cerato VCSe 100, a communications server solution supporting five to 9,000 users, the ability to network thousands of locations, and centralized system administration. The VCSe 100 is easy to install and administer, takes advantage of SIP technology and integrates to other Teltronics VCSe servers installed throughout the WWRD worldwide organization.

The VCSe 100 operating at the Waterford City, Ireland, retail location communicates via SIP to all WWRD offices.

The platform supports WWRDs existing digital (E1) and analog trunks allowing The House of Waterford Crystal to migrate to a pure SIP environment at their own pace.

The Results. As a result of the implementation of the VCSe 100 at the House of Waterford Crystal, WWRD has increased customer service and realized cost savings at a corporate level.

Prior to the implementation, visitors of the House of Waterford Crystal returning home to the United States could only place a toll call back to Ireland if they needed customer care.  In fact, if the U.S.-based customer contacted the U.S. customer care center, they would then have to hang up the phone and make the toll call to Ireland. Since the implementation, all visitors calling into any of the customer care centers can now be transferred via a four-digit dial pattern anywhere in the world.  This aspect alone saves WWRD visitors thousands of dollars in toll costs and has vastly improved customer care.

In addition to the savings and satisfaction of their visitors, WWRD has realized internal cost savings as well. Most notably, WWRD is able to provide remote maintenance to the House of Waterford Crystal from its U.S.-based support center. And, the ease of use of the system has decreased costs of training and loss of productivity by staff members.

Furthermore, WWRD now saves several thousand dollars per year in toll calls. This savings comes as a direct result of the SIP-based voice network between WWRD locations employed by integrating the VCSe 100 with their other Teltronics communication systems.  Since the newly installed VCSe 100 takes advantage of the WWRDs existing data infrastructure, the company also realizes a savings since traditional voice circuits are no longer needed.

The WWRD headquarters location receives approximately 15,000 calls per month with approximately 5,600 calls routed via the Teltronics Semplice OMNIWorks contact center to various WWRD locations such as Waterford City. The Waterford City location accepts over 1,000 calls per month using the VCSe 100 communication server.