A UK estate agency chain: one contact centre and phone system for every branch

Through organic growth, and through mergers and acquisitions, the agency had built a large network of local and regional branches. Each had arrived with its own telephony habits, numbers and ways of answering, and customers felt the difference. The business wanted every branch to act as part of one customer experience layer, while keeping what makes a local estate agent valuable: a buyer, seller or landlord reaching the people who know their property.

That meant standardising telephony, call distribution and the phone system under one orchestration and configuration framework, common to every site, user, location and branch. It also meant moving dozens of live branches onto the new platform without customers noticing anything other than a better service.

Working under sub-contract to a UK Genesys reseller partner, QVCCS delivered the full lifecycle: discovery, design, build, test and prove, user acceptance testing and go-live. Discovery mapped every branch, number, team and call path across the estate. Design turned that into a single framework, so that a new branch, or the next acquisition, could be brought on board by following the pattern rather than inventing a new one.

The solution used Genesys Cloud CX as both contact centre and phone system. Front-line staff were licensed on Genesys Cloud CX 1, and back-office colleagues, who needed calling, presence and the directory but not routed customer interactions, used the Communicate licence. Licensing each group for what it does kept the contact centre capability where it was needed.

1. Discovery across every branch, number, team and existing call path
2. Design of one routing, telephony and configuration framework for all sites and users
3. Build of call flows, queues, sites, number plans and user configuration to that framework
4. Test and prove, then user acceptance testing with branch and contact centre staff
5. A phased live migration of branches, with go-live support at every wave

Routing was designed around how estate agency actually works. Each call is identified in two ways: the dialled number shows which region or branch the caller was trying to reach, and a CRM lookup by the caller's telephone number supplies the context needed to route on their current status and activity. Wherever possible, the caller is connected to the person already handling their enquiry, or otherwise to their most local regional office. When the named enquiry owner is out on a viewing or otherwise unavailable, the call overspills to colleagues in that same branch. And when the lookups return little, a sound default pathway still delivers the call to a local branch, together with what the caller chose in the IVR and why they left it, so nobody starts from scratch.

Underneath sits one configuration framework for telephony, the contact centre and the phone system together. Voice for every branch is carried through BYOC Cloud, and every branch follows the same conventions for numbers, sites, dial plans, queues and users, so the business manages dozens of offices as one estate, and reporting compares like with like.

Because front-line agents and back-office colleagues share one platform, a call passed from the contact centre to a branch specialist, or back again, stays inside Genesys Cloud CX. Presence shows who is free before the transfer, and the directory reaches everyone across the estate, so internal hand-offs are quicker and customers are not passed to an outside number.

The migration was successful, and it was demanding. Bringing the telephony and its dial plans to a single point took significant coordination, with many dozens of sites affected by the live migration at a time, while a good customer experience was maintained throughout. The agency now runs every branch on one platform, with one framework to extend as it grows.

• Every branch on one Genesys Cloud CX platform, as contact centre and phone system
• Callers routed to their enquiry handler or most local office, with overspill to the same branch
• One configuration framework for all sites, users and locations, ready for future acquisitions
• Dozens of live branches migrated with customer service maintained throughout

Multi-site migrations succeed or fail on coordination. The platform design matters, but so do the hundreds of small decisions about numbers, dial plans, cut-over timing and who answers which call on the day. Taking the programme from discovery to go-live within one team meant the people who designed the framework were the same people moving each branch onto it, and every lesson from one wave improved the next.