The British Shops and Stores Association Story

• High level of personal service
• Provider to the BSSA for 9 years demonstrating the continuing success of the service
• Confidence in their own telecoms

The British Shops and Stores Association has over 4000 retail members with a
combined turnover of more than £3 billion, trading out of 6200 outlets and
employing in excess of 45,000 staff.

The BSSA was established in 1991 as a consequence of the merger of the
Drapers' Chamber of Trade, Menswear Association of Britain and National
Association of Retail Furnishers. The BSSA has enjoyed continual growth in
membership in recent years from across the spectrum of high street retailers.

The Challenge

One of the primary tasks of the BSSA is to provide a comprehensive and
highly competitive portfolio business and professional services to its members.
Uniworld was chosen to provide the telecoms service to BSSA members
(becoming preferred telecoms supplier) and a significant and growing number
of have signed up to this service to date.

The BSSA has also invested heavily in its own infrastructure in order to
effectively sell this member service.

Solutions

The BSSA transferred its own call traffic and line rental and Uniworld now
provides a range of calls, lines and ISDN30 lines.

These lines are being used for diverse traffic including calls, fax, PDQ network
connectivity, modems and servers.

ISDN30 offers fast speeds, supports multimedia communications and can carry
from 8-30 channels to maximise the capacity for calls and data traffic.

The ISDN30 line is being used to carry a range of direct dial numbers. As a
digital line this offers built-in redundancy and site assurance in the event of
site changes, moves or natural disasters such as flooding.

Uniworld provides telecoms and data services to 194 members of the British
Shops and Stores Association to date.

Outcomes

The BSSA is benefiting from the same high level of personal service that many
of the BSSA members are taking advantage of.

This also means that the BSSA is well placed to evaluate the ongoing
performance of the service to ensure that Uniworld consistently delivers added
value to the members.

With 194 members of the BSSA signed up to date the relationship is very
strong. Many of the members of the BSSA benefit greatly from using Uniworld
to install new lines when they open new sites or businesses.

Uniworld has been the preferred provider of the BSSA for 9 years
demonstrating the continuing success of the service and the relationship.

Bob Jarrett of the BSSA said "We can’t sell a service we don’t believe it and
haven’t proven ourselves. We use Uniworld for our own telecoms and are very
satisfied with the quality of service we receive. We regularly review our
partners and we have been successfully working with Uniworld for many years
now in a genuine partnership. We feel very confident that our telecoms are
safe and well looked after".