National League football club Eastleigh FC has adopted NEC’s UNIVERGE BLUE CONNECT to significantly upgrade its communications capability. The club, based in Eastleigh, Hampshire in the UK, was established in 1946 and is nicknamed The Spitfires after the World War II aircraft that were developed and built in the town. Playing in the fifth tier of English football, the team has aspirations to enter the English Football League (EFL) and regularly hosts more than 5,000 fans at its home ground, the Silverlake Stadium.
Committed to continuing to be a club at the heart of its community, Eastleigh FC saw the need to improve how it handles calls and responds to customer enquiries. “The solution that was in place previously was simply not fit for purpose,” confirms Alex Pike, the club’s Commercial Manager. “Not only where we missing lots of incoming calls, we were also unable to route them through to the correct department. Since COVID, we have staff that now work remotely and from home and the Chairman also wanted to be contactable at all times, especially on away match days. None of this was possible with the system we had in place. We are a full-time professional football club with ambitions of entering the EFL as soon as possible, however, you wouldn’t have thought that when calling into the club.”
Eastleigh FC therefore turned to F One Technologies which advised selection of NEC’s UNIVERGE BLUE CONNECT. The solution combines the phone system, chat, video, screen sharing, file management and conference calling into a seamless experience that allows mobile devices to become part of the CONNECT phone system. The solution also extends video conferencing capabilities to conference rooms to keep in-office and remote workers connected.
“UNIVERGE BLUE is extremely feature rich, but at the same time, very simple and straightforward to operate,” adds Pike. “It also allows us to make changes ourselves via the portal, which we weren’t able to do on our old system. The mobile app has changed the way we work completely.”
These benefits have not resulted in additional costs for the club. UNIVERGE BLUE has lowered its IT admin and costs by 30% and increased team efficiency by 55%, says Pike. “We are now able to get in touch with all staff, regardless of location, check their availability with the presence feature, as well have all our calls recorded remotely which is incredible,” he explains.
“UNIVERGE BLUE has increased team efficiency by 55%”
The transition from the previous system to UNIVERGE BLUE CONNECT was smooth and rapid. “Within two days, we had our old system decommissioned and the new one fully installed, complete with full training to all staff on the business desktop phones as well as the mobile and softphone applications,” says Pike. “We are able to route the calls to the correct department using the auto attendant feature. We use hunt groups when that department is unable to answer so someone can deal with the call, and we can retrieve and call back clients and suppliers using the missed call data. We also benefit hugely from the mobile and softphone applications.”
