ZERO NEGATIVE
OPERATIONAL IMPACT
EXPANDED FUNCTIONALITY
ENHANCED SUPPORT
X4 Group – Recruitment Case Study
X4 Group began with a single-site operation in Covent Garden in 2008, expanding to a pan-continent enterprise with professional recruitment agents and offices in 5 locations. Being able to support clients with excellent, personalised service is an essential pillar of their business, so reliable network connectivity and unified communications is core.
- X4 engaged Synergy in May 2011 when they’d outgrown their current phone service and wanted some expert assistance to support their aggressive growth plans.
- Migrated from BT VoIP to 8×8 Unified Communications platform (referred to as UCaaS) in Oct 2019 to enable global growth with operations currently in the US, Europe, and Australasia.
- Subsequently migrated to 8×8 X-Series platform in June 2021, improving efficiencies by 20% from the enhanced analytics package X-Series offers; with a further step to increasing this with native integration of their CRM platform.
- Supporting their growth to 200+ team members in London alone.
- Multiple office moves and new locations carefully managed by the Synergy team.
- Benefitted from CAPEX costs, being amortised over the course of the contract.
- Synergy supporting business growth with the effective and proactive use of technology.
- Empowering people to be the best they can is at the heart of the X4 ethos, be that their internal team or the clients they support.
Challenges
- True international local dial numbers for offices in New York, Berlin, and New Zealand. This also allowed X4 to call countries beyond their office footprint from local numbers improving candidate pick up rates resulting in higher job fulfilment rates.
- Pay-as-you-go pricing model – Previously on a Pay-As-You-Go pricing model – costs spiralled, particularly expensive calls to International Mobile numbers – 8×8’s flexible and unlimited calling license model eradicated fluctuating costs allowing for improved budgeting, particularly useful in a post-Covid world.
- Improve analytics – particularly with team members working from home during COVID lockdowns and the hybrid working moving forward; enables X4’s management team to quickly identify users that need assistance, or further training.
- Being a dynamic, fast-growing business X4 Group often recruited new team members quickly at short notice, therefore speed of deployment of services is critical to their expansion. Synergy reached out to X4 Group at the beginning of 2021 regarding upgrading their existing 8×8 platform experience to X-Series, a platform that Synergy, through their many years of supporting and working with X4 Group, believed would add tremendous value to their business in a post-COVID world. As flexi-working was being adopted across the business and putting more of an ownness on Call Analytics and information capture to ensure business targets and goals could continue to be met, a key objective for X4 Group was enabling acceleration of revenue and profit growth despite the difficulties that COVID had brought to the recruitment sector.
The X-Series is built on this same exact successful premise by:
- Delivering a targeted customer experience.
- Automating processes and identifying actionable business insights using advanced analytics.
- Enabling new business models.
- Facilitating flexible work locations while maintaining business continuity.
The vast array of increased platform benefits, alongside improved and enhanced analytics were enough to convince X4 Group of this migration and entrust Synergy to move forward with scoping, planning, implementing this requirement.
Implementation
The project was very much a collaborative exercise with key objectives being at the heart of the project, along with ensuring there was zero operational impact, be that to X4 Group employees or clients.
The migration was managed in an efficient manner by Synergy – ensuring all parties involved in the implementation were kept fully briefed, and aware of every step being taken.
Understanding the operational requirements of X4 Group and the importance of their UCaaS solution, whilst assessing business impact and mitigating business risk, the migration was undertaken over a weekend in June 2021, during a timeframe when business operations were at their absolute minimal, to ensure impact on service was not felt.
To help give the best possible migration experience to X4 Group, Synergy were on site every step of the way. From migration kick-off through to walking the floor post migration and providing complimentary training on the X-Series enhanced features and analytics.
This successful implementation method resulted in the continued operations for X4 Group throughout this migration period in what X4 Group later described as “an extremely successful deployment”.
Michael Norris, Co-founder and CCO, X4 Group later commented on the success of the migration and the fantastic work that Synergy had done:
“It’s amazing how well the migration went in hindsight. Synergy have been a trusted supplier of ours for many years and we should’ve known from the offset that this was going to be as smooth as a migration you could get really. The planning and implementation was undertaken in such a way that all parties felt involved and communicated with, with the migration window also proving to be a success and all scheduled tasks were completed as originally described and forecasted”
Michael Norris, Co-founder and CCO, X4 Group later commented on the success of the migration and the fantastic work that Synergy had done:
“It’s amazing how well the migration went in hindsight. Synergy have been a trusted supplier of ours for many years and we should’ve known from the offset that this was going to be as smooth as a migration you could get really. The planning and implementation was undertaken in such a way that all parties felt involved and communicated with, with the migration window also proving to be a success and all scheduled tasks were completed as originally described and forecasted”
Training
- Onsite training demonstrations on GO-LIVE day of X-Series platform.
- Platform demonstrations & access setup to new analytics features given to X4 Group users both remotely as well as onsite by Synergy’s Service Desk.
- Responsibility hierarchy assigned Super User Access to the platform, giving more control to manage their requirements in-house.
Benefits
The Unified Communications service Synergy implemented replaced the existing X4 Group communication platform seamlessly, providing:
- Expanded functionality.
- Ease of deployment and scalability, matching X4 Group’s growth plans.
- Enhanced remote support.
- Enhanced calling features and analytics package.
To achieve significantly more from their Telecoms was always a target for X4 Group, and consolidating suppliers also made the day-to-day support and maintenance far simpler.
Sam Bysouth, Director of Operations and Compliance at X4 Group, explained that Synergy’s ‘concierge level’ service had enabled him to focus less on the day to day running of the Telephony and become more involved with assisting the Directors with growing the business and providing better statistical data from their critical business applications:
“Whilst I was always comfortable novating our Telecoms services to the cloud, I had reservations about the scalability and potential business downtime this would have on our business, but I was extremely impressed with the ease in which Synergy were able to adopt their practices to ensure a smooth migration of our services that now enable our business to really get the best analytics and enhancements we need to be a leader in the Technology and Life Sciences recruitment space”
Sam also talked about how X4 Group have gradually adopted the integration benefits on offer from the platform, initially using the solution purely as a telephone system but now benefit from the enhanced calling features and analytics package that X-Series offers, with native integration into the CRM as the next phase of their journey.
