The Heart of England Co-operative Story

• 90% decrease in the number of faults against their previous provider
• High levels of reliability & care for their telecoms and especially the highly important funeral lines
• Excellent customer service with a named Account Manager & team

The Heart of England Co-operative Society have been customers of Uniworld
for 7 years. They turnover over £77.7M and have more than 70 retail stores
and sites encompassing food stores, lifestyle stores, funeral services, travel
care sites and post offices.

The Challenge

After a series of connection problems with another provider on their funeral
lines. These problems included issues such as incoming and outgoing calls
being prevented by network issues and calls cutting out during use.

A quality service and constant availability for these funeral lines is clearly
critical given the huge importance of showing sensitivity and customer care.

One of the primary problems was that the area contains many old and
dilapidated exchanges which were having an effect on their service.

The primary aim of switching their telecoms to Uniworld was to achieve high
levels of reliability on these very sensitive and important lines. A secondary
aim was to reduce costs and receive consistently good customer service.

Solutions

The Heart of England Co-operative Society use Uniworld for a range of
services including single and multi analogue lines, calls, ISDN lines and ADSL
broadband across multiple sites.

The ISDN and broadband lines provider the retailer with connectivity to carry
multi-media and internet data traffic.

‘Gold Care’ is provided on a line in each funeral home (a total of 15 with Gold
Care) as part of the focus on these business critical lines.

Clive Miles, Internal Auditor for the Heart of England Co-operative Society said
"Our funeral division works with more than 2000 families each year so it’s vital
that we have an excellent service on the calls we handle both on these lines
and right across the Co-operative".

The Co-op also benefits from a 10% discount on their line rental against the
costs of their previous provider. The quality of service has also been raised by
routing calls via over the UK-wide IP network of Uniworld’s parent company

Outcomes

As well as the quality of service Uniworld provides a 4-hour response level
with a 24-hour problem resolution guarantee across the funeral sites. Regular
service reviews ensure that the service level remains at the highest possible
standards expected by the Heart of England Co-op.

Uniworld also uses its influence with BT Openreach to ensure the Co-Op
receive the best possible service and constant feedback if any issues arise due
to the old exchanges within the area. In many cases customers struggle to
get BT to respond and by handing this task to Uniworld the resolution of any
problems is significantly quickened.

Prior to joining Uniworld the Heart if England Co-operative Society experienced
around 20 faults a month. This has decreased to just 10% of the former total
and the Gold Care provided has also given the Co-op extra piece of mind.

In addition the Co-op has a named Account Manager and customer service
team for their telecoms which is a real benefit to the business in always being
able to speak to a person rather than an automated voice response system.

Clive Miles added "We are a unique organisation combining a sizeable turnover
centrally with a need for a very local and personal service to our customers
across a wide range of sites. Therefore we benefit greatly from Uniworld’s
personal customer service to us as this means we can get the human face we
need from our telecoms provider whilst also benefitting from their size and
ability to work with us as an £80M business"