Harrison Drury elevates its employee and customer experience

 Award winning law firm, Harrison Drury, is enhancing and simplifying communications and collaboration for its solicitors, IT and admin staff with a digital workplace solution built on the Avaya OneCloud™ UCaaS platform that will improve both its employee experience and customer experience. In a matter of weeks, the law firm rolled out Avaya Cloud Office® by RingCentral to 130 users across 7 offices in the north-west located in Preston, Kendal, Lancaster, Garstang and Clitheroe. Through this process, Harrison Drury enabled flexible, always-on video conferencing and workstream collaboration to support working from anywhere while reducing business communications’ costs. 

Harrison Drury exists to “make it possible” and its communications system needed to support this mission but its legacy communications solution, relying on multiple applications and different systems for voice calls and video conferencing, meant that even the most basic task was admin intensive for users and administrators. Addressing regular complaints about managing these systems took up a lot of time for IT staff; time that could be better spent elevating the business. The law firm’s lack of satisfaction with the existing phone solution came to a head when COVID-19 forced Harrison Drury employees to work from home, complicating the client response process. In a competitive market, the firm’s solicitors were unable to receive and transfer customer calls with the pre-requisite information they needed, such as caller-ID, to enable them to react quickly during fast-paced customer transactions.  

Following a re-evaluation of its communications needs, Harrison Drury worked with Avaya ecosystem partner, Fortay Connect, a trusted advisor to the law firm that understood its requirements, provided market insights, and optimised the evaluation process. Following a competitive proposal, Harrison Drury chose Avaya Cloud Office for its wide list of features and cross device compatibility. On return to office working, the firm took the opportunity to look for a modern communications solution with the flexibility to support hybrid working and to eliminate the complexity of its previous siloed system. 

“The simplicity of Avaya Cloud Office has noticeably improved our business capabilities,” says Martin Holmes, Head of IT, Harrison Drury. “Tasks that used to require 10-12 clicks to complete now take two and, after completing some 4,000 calls with the new system, we haven’t had a single query or complaint, relieving IT staff to focus on recording data and analytics. What’s more, we now have visibility over which solicitors are busy or which ones are available to take incoming calls, meaning we can reroute calls to ensure they are received. As a result, our missed call rate has halved, doubling the number of new business leads. This is a great return on investment, considering our overall communications costs have also shrunk.  

“Our previous telephony system involved personalised desktop handsets that required significant reconfiguration for more than one user, which made hotdesking complicated. Minutes and seconds can have a big impact during a major court case and our previous system took too much time to use and manage. With Avaya Cloud Office, our solicitors get a single number that they can personalise and use across mobile, laptop and desktop handsets. What’s more, they can log in using a single sign-on on any device and access their unique configuration, enabling them to jump on customer requests from wherever they are and access all the information they need to be of the most effective.”  

Steve Joyner, Managing Director UK&I Avaya, said: “We’re delighted to see Harrison Drury improve its communications capabilities with Avaya – the work they do is so important to so many and they now have a system through which they can reach more people. The employee experience is directly tied to the customer experience: empowered employees have more time and resources to be of better service to their customers. Harrison Drury has done just this with Avaya Cloud Office and we look forward to helping them continue their success.”