Swim England takes the plunge with CaaS to reap remote work benefits

Swim England, the national governing body for swimming in England, has deployed the XCaaS (eXperience Communications as a Service) solution from 8x8 to equip its remote-working employees and contact centres with the communications capabilities needed to operate within the modern workplace. 

During the Covid-19 pandemic, Swim England’s three contact centres, which are responsible for enquiries related to awards, teacher training and membership, operated through an on-premise legacy ISDN platform. As the need for the organisation’s employees to work remotely became imperative, the inflexibility of the existing system became apparent.

Also, employees, both knowledge workers and contact centre agents, working from home had no other option than to use their personal mobile or home numbers to conduct business calls because they had previously always been office-based with no access to a softphone.

Swim England saw the needed for a cloud solution that could be quickly implemented to ensure there was no disruption of service and would support its employees working remotely. And as the organisation continues to grow, the technology would need to support its communications requirements, regardless of where employees or customers are located.

“We had been relying on our legacy solution for many years, and knew it was time for a change,” said Kalpesh Parmar, head of IT at Swim England. “The necessity of remote work accelerated our digital transformation plans and our move to the cloud much more quickly than anticipated.”

With input from IT specialist Cranberry Communications, Swim England chose 8x8 XCaaS for its functionality, ease of use and content-sharing capabilities, which will support its growing communications requirements. Functionality includes an integrated cloud contact centre, voice, team chat, video meetings and CPaaS embeddable APIs.

The ability to use 8x8 Work’s enterprise voice, video meetings and team chat capabilities from a computer, mobile device or web browser has enabled Swim England’s employees to work from anywhere, communicating with the public and collaborating easily with colleagues, all from the same app. Also, 8x8 service plans come standard with unlimited domestic and international calling, which eliminated the need to provision and pay for employees and contact centre agents’ monthly mobile phone contracts. As a result of implementing 8x8, Swim England’s monthly platform operating costs were reduced by 35%.

“The transition to the 8x8 platform was very quick and seamless, even given the complexities of implementing a new solution, while maintaining a high-level of service for our customers with little disruption,” added Parmar.

Jamie Snaddon, EMEA managing director at 8x8, said: “Companies, both in the public and private sector, will continue to make purposeful shifts towards cloud-first communications environments, removing silos, improving employee and customer engagement, and reducing costs. Using the XCaaS platform, organisations like Swim England can speed information flows, allowing them to be more agile and responsive to citizen and customer needs.”