Knight Frank
Knight Frank: Knight Frank is a global real estate consultancy headquartered in London, with 487 offices across 53 territories and more than 20,000 staff.
At a glance
The issue:
When the UK business migrated to Microsoft Teams, the telephony system needed to be simplified, modernised and moved from on-premise Session Border Controllers (SBC’s) to cloud-based before key support contracts expired.
The project:
The legacy hardware was replaced with a Gamma cloud-based solution. Thousands of numbers were ported over, and the entire project was completed in less than 4 weeks.
The outcome:
Along with high levels of availability, reliability and resilience, the new system has allowed easier system troubleshooting and management, along with measurable cost savings.
The Background
Founded in 1896 and headquartered in London, UK, Knight Frank is one of the world’s leading independent real estate consultancies, providing worldwide residential and commercial services that are locally expert and globally informed.
The entire network’s focus is to partner with clients and give them the best experience possible. This has led to recognition as an innovative business leader in exceptional customer service globally.
When the UK business chose to update the existing telephony platform for its 3,000 staff over 79 locations, legacy equipment going out of support quickly made the project time-critical. Tight deadlines and the ongoing commitment to exceptional client relationships meant that Knight Frank needed an agile and trusted partner to provide a seamless service transition, fast.
The Challenge
As part of a migration from Skype to Microsoft Teams, Knight Frank wanted to modernise and simplify the UK business’s telephony environment by eliminating on premise Session Border Controllers (SBC’s) hardware in favour of a virtualised cloud-based telephony solution.
Physical telephone management appliances in the London centres were going out of support, creating unacceptable risk of failure, and requiring the business to quickly source a solution.
Facing a time critical project, Knight Frank needed to accelerate their procurement processes, and as such reached out to their most trusted strategic partners and suppliers for proposals.
Why Maintel
Maintel has a long history of successful project delivery for Knight Frank, reaching back almost 20 years.
As well as proposing an effective solution at a competitive price, Maintel’s close and well-established working relationship with Knight Frank offered unprecedented flexibility. In order to maintain support coverage, Knight Frank were forced to expedite the procurement process, due diligence and delivery, and Maintel were in a position to support them in that.
Reflecting the commitment and trust on both sides, the Maintel team mobilised to begin ‘pre-work’ on the project before the contracts had been finalised.
The Solution
Maintel provided Knight Frank with a cloud communication system from Gamma, one of Maintel’s key strategic technology partners. Knight Frank had previous experience with Gamma and were comfortable the suggested solution would reliably maintain customer communications.
The migration was seamless, with thousands of numbers ported without any interruptions to service. When a couple of failed ports were identified, they were simply rolled back and completed later to ensure a smooth transition.
And most importantly for Knight Frank, the critical deadlines were adhered to. The entire project was completed in 3-4 weeks.
What are the benefits?
Reliability:
Knight Frank’s immediate concern was out-of-support telephony hardware failing. The new cloud-based solution is designed to ensure their property experts are reliably available to support clients across a range of sectors and services without interruption.
Cost Savings:
The IT team were able to identify many redundant phone numbers through this migration process. They were able to rationalise the core telephone backbone and reduce the number of SIP channels which allowed them to achieve cost savings of thousands of pounds per month.
Management:
The call manager solution has put the business in a resilient position, giving them the ability to divert numbers easily for business continuity in case of emergency. Advanced call management information and analytics have also allowed them to carry out troubleshooting on call failures to improve every customer contact.
What does the future hold?
It is anticipated that this solution will in due course be rolled out by Maintel to Knight Franks European and Global offices.
As one of Knight Frank’s preferred strategic partners, Maintel has been trusted with a number of ongoing and future projects.
As well as winning telephone routing business, Maintel is helping to upgrade switches and access points in regional Knight Frank offices and continues to provide hardware support consultancy around core networking infrastructure.
There are also potential information security and mobile phone projects in the pipeline.
Client Testimonial
“Confidence and trust are the benefits of a long-term relationship. We assumed Maintel would deliver on this project the way they always have. And they did.”
Phil Hurcom, Head of IT Service Delivery, Knight Frank
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