Citizens Advice Bureau

The offices of the Citizens Advice Bureau form the UK’s largest charitable advice service. Staff in 3,000 locations provide confidential and impartial help to members of the public seeking to resolve their legal, money, consumer and other problems.

At the Citizens Advice Bureau (CAB), the telephone is a vital channel for delivering advisory services. Yet at many of its sites, its telephony services were costly and inconvenient. In North Hertfordshire, staff had no direct lines, and incoming calls were often transferred around different people before reaching their destination.

The Bureau was also paying line rental per phone, and calls between sites were extremely costly.

Keen to exploit the cost and efficiency potential of Voice over IP, the North Hertfordshire branch of the CAB chose the Nortel Business Communications Manager 50 which allowed the Bureau to route calls, create personal call profiles for staff, and reap all the benefits of IP telephony. For handsets, CAB chose the Nortel IP Phone 2002 along with the flexible Nortel Business Series Terminal T7316E .

• A vast reduction in voice costs on inter-site calls
• A built-in auto attendant function that allows the CAB to automate the handling of high-volume calls by offering a variety of recorded options, such as finding out opening hours, or speaking to someone for advice
• Greater staff productivity , and the ability to offer people wider access to CAB services