Case Study: Akixi Transforms College’s Communications Infrastructure

North Warwickshire & Hinckley College is one of the largest and most successful colleges in the Midlands. Due to its excellent facilities, strong partnerships with major employers and universities, and excellent international relationships North Warwickshire & Hinckley College is now a sought-after place to study for thousands of young people and adults.

In January 2013, the college became a newly federated college when they officially joined forces with South Leicestershire College overseen by one principal. This is only the second time two Further Education colleges have joined forces in this way. This new federation has allowed the college to expand courses by sharing expertise, resources and have improved support for the students.

Majid Shaikh, IT Team Leader for the college explains “The catalyst for this review was the opportunity presented by the decision to federate and the first steps surrounded the integration of offsite data back-ups and having our BT accounts merged in to one – moves that resulted in reducing our costs. We then decided to replace our ISDN lines for SIP trunks to provide greater flexibility and to further reduce costs.

The problem was however that in order to deploy SIP trunks we would have to individually upgrade all of our telephone systems to be SIP compatible.

We soon discovered that the cost of these upgrades would be prohibitive and began looking at alternative solutions”.

It was against this backdrop that the college decided to review its communications infrastructure that serves five campus locations. Focus Group recommended the Akixi cloud-based call management and call centre reporting service.

Akixi enables the college to see who is calling who and log and return any missed calls, this feature is particularly popular with the parents of the students.

Akixi has customisable report styles that include over 200 real time and historical statistics, dials, graphs and wallboards. Majid explains, “The report styles such as calls by telephone number, unreturned lost calls, calls by extension numbers and calls made by any selected interval are examples of the parameters that employees of the college can see measure and report on when necessary.”

Akixi does not have any software requirements or long capital expenditure which proves a great benefit for many businesses since you only pay for what you use on a monthly basis and there is a minimal technical set up. Majid states the main appeal for using Akixi is that “since it is a cloud-based application it is always up to date; available anywhere and everywhere which means disaster recovery is built in.”

One of Akixi’s many features that is very popular amongst their customers is our wallboard which is available in both the 1000 and 2000 call reporting levels. “The fact that the information tiles are configurable means that we can tailor the display to show us at a glance the key metrics we need to manage and control such as the number of calls waiting and calls abandoned”, says Majid.

In conclusion Majid strongly believes that the Akixi service has helped transform the college’s communications infrastructure which has in turn enables a more efficient management of the 5 campuses. “The impact of using the application has been highly positive. Akixi lets staff monitor call volumes and flow, allowing us to staff accordingly and cater for peak periods. Akixi allows us to track missed or lost calls which means we can contact customers that would have been previously missed or lost.”

“Akixi allows us to see what is happening in our business and I say that the top three features we use are real-time, historical reports and the report wall where we can view live user data. It provides at a glance views of our activity all of which can be reported upon and lets staff monitor call volumes and flow, allowing us to staff accordingly and cater for peak periods. Akixi allows us to track missed or lost calls which means we can contact customers that would have been previously missed or lost.” Majid Shaikh, IT Team Leader, NWHC

For more information, go to www.akixi.com