WDP are a charity providing drug and alcohol treatment and recovery services in London, the South East and East of England.

As such, WDP have case workers scattered across many disparate facilities, meeting with clients in various locations that are often owned by partners.

Being in the third sector makes it important to find efficient solutions to comms and IT problems presented by such a variety of premises. There is the added requirement that services are required on contracts of a finite time, with equipment sometimes requiring redeployment.

Client liaison demands a respect for privacy in line with mental health service provision, which impacts services used. Mobile phones clearly have their place but there remains a requirement for traditional office phones, on local rate numbers, allowing clients to contact case workers who in turn need to contact other professionals.

When taking over existing premises or services, WDP typically inherit elderly ISDN based phone systems. Such systems were developed in the 1990s and since ISDN will be withdrawn from service by 2025 the technology is old and will not be further developed, making them costly to maintain and update.

Wizards have been working with WDP for some years, mainly in the provision of low rate numbers, and the pressure has been on to find a reliable fix against the requirement for highly flexible low cost comms solutions. Working with IT Manager Martyn Faller, Wizards have, from an initial proof of concept project, built out a service ready to be deployed across the business at a known fixed cost as new services are opened and others cease.

Delivering telephony from the cloud means IT staff arrive at new offices, plug handsets into the network using Ethernet cables and the central cloud managed service identifies them, automatically assigning direct dial numbers and extensions on the WDP phone system. Within a matter of minutes, new users and/or services can be added, assigned numbers and extensions, with features such as call divert, voicemail, call transfer, hunt groups, twinning and, where required, call recording from an organisation wide template. Moves, adds and changes are managed using a central, easy to use console and those same handsets can quickly be redeployed into new offices using the same process.

Martyn Faller commented “3CX hosted VoIP is ideal for WDP as it enables us to quickly deliver telephony to the desktop in a standard way our users understand at a very low fixed cost per desktop. It is ideal for us as it delivers the flexibility to start and stop services as needed. At the same time, we keep costs low and avoid the kinds of expensive shocks we have encountered with phone systems in the past. I can only see our use of hosted 3CX expanding.”