Alzheimer’s Research UK

TeamsLink Case Study

The Business

Alzheimer’s Research UK is the UK’s leading dementia research charity, dedicated to the causes, diagnosis, prevention, treatment, and cure of Alzheimer’s. Their research challenges the ways people think about dementia, and crucially, provides the funding to help leading scientists make breakthroughs that will change lives.

Challenge

Being heavily dependent on over the phone donations, Alzheimer’s Research had concerns about their outdated and unreliable phone system. This escalated further with reports of engaged tones and dead lines: they had no idea what calls they were losing, what it was costing, and how many donations they were missing.

With some staff members working from home and some working from their main Cambridge office, these issues were being exacerbated causing frustration for staff members and donors alike.

Further to this, with the first few cases of Covid-19 appearing in the UK, it was crucial that Alzheimer’s Research had a reliable, flexible and cost effective solution that would allow them to continue to work throughout a possible lockdown period.

Solution

Replacing their telephony system was the answer, but the type of telephony solution was the question.

Users within the organisation were already using Teams, so Alzheimer’s Research UK were looking at the choice of two solutions: Microsoft’s Phone System or TeamsLink. Due to the nature of their business, and their income riding on the results, Alzheimer’s Research UK needed full contact centre functionality as well as the highest of SLAs.

Due to these requirements, Risc IT Solutions recommended TeamsLink. TeamsLink is hosted on their own servers meaning there’s additional business protection from outages. TeamsLink also met their stringent compliance needs, had full contact centre capabilities that were easy to manage, and was intuitive for their end users, making it the perfect solution.

Before onboarding, Alzheimer’s Research rightly undertook due diligence, speaking to existing customers of Risc, and meeting with TeamsLink. To demonstrate proof of concept, we deployed the solution to a small team operating alongside their existing system in a hybrid capacity to unearth any regional issues with call quality and usability. This test ran for a month with the solution working seamlessly.

Whilst there was already a high level of security across the organisation, Risc IT fine tuned this and enabled a foundation of controls to ensure users would follow best practice.

Although being able to work easily and securely from home was the top priority, we knew that most staff would return to the office in some capacity once it was safe. In preparation for their eventual return, we recommended YeaLink room system. This is a wireless Teams telephony device that works alongside TeamsLink and allows simple and inclusive multiparty collaboration. It brings the functionality of Teams to a face to face meeting and is ideal for hybrid office and remote working.

Just before the switch over date, a tailored training package was delivered so users had hands on experience of their new solution and were confident with its functionality.

Client Interview

The following video is a live case study with Dom Loia – Head of IT at Alzheimer’s Research UK.
The footage has been captured from one of our regular webinars.

Results

With the onset of Covid-19 coupled with a failing system, the current situation for Alzheimer’s Research UK could have been completely different. They could have ended up with 1 person trying to answer 20 calls simultaneously from the main number, whilst also manually diverting calls.

With Risc IT and TeamsLink, Alzheimer’s Research UK have seamlessly transitioned to Hybrid working. This is aided by the granularity of TeamsLink’s PowerBi reporting: they can now see how many calls they have taken and their most popular times. Most importantly, there’s no limit to simultaneous calls so engaged tones, dead lines, and missed donations are a thing of the past.

All of this works seamlessly across devices and locations, meaning their solution suits them now, and will continue to do so in the future. We’re proud to have helped Alzheimer’s Research UK. In just six weeks we provided a platform and firm foundation for future success.

“We recently rolled out TeamsLink across the organisation. The technology has enabled flexibility and reliability that we didn’t have previously. In our current climate, this has ensured our entire workforce have been able to make the transition firstly to homeworking, and now Hybrid working, with ease.

Thanks to Risc IT Solutions’ project management and thorough onsite training, the rollout of Teams was seamless and ensured our employees were well informed on how best to utilise the technology.

This has enabled us to communicate and collaborate more effectively and will further enable Alzheimer’s Research UK to work towards our mission”.

Head of IT – Alzheimer’s Research UK

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Alzheimer's Research UK TeamsLink Case Study - Risc IT Solutions

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