The ClientTelecoms World plc are independent business telephony experts. As the UK’s leading supplier of inbound call solutions they have provided 03 and 08 business number services nationwide for almost ten years. Their specialist expertise allows them to deliver enhanced telecoms solutions to both sole traders and nationwide corporations with hundreds of employees. They manage over 10,000 business numbers across the UK. High profile clients include Transport for London (TFL) and the National Health Service (NHS), together with big name brands such as Adidas and Peugeot.
Their innovative online tools for the reporting & management of business number packages are complemented by a team of dedicated and proactive account managers to provide solutions best suited to their clients’ established business goals.
Working closely with both the sales and marketing department of Telecoms World, Ecce Media developed a new sales and administrative online platform.
Whilst functional and profitable; Telecoms World’s business needs had outgrown their dated web platform. A lack of sophistication in the existing administrative tools meant wasted staff hours on repetitive, manual processes in desperate need of automating. Inferior site content management meant that when the marketing team needed simple changes to the website copy these had to be passed back to the old development team. This meant additional development time, code base changes and ultimately additional cost.
Limitations in their old e-commerce handling meant that Telecoms Worlds’ full service range could not be made available to purchase online, and was unable to handle the promotional requirements of the marketing team.
In sum Telecoms World required a complete overhaul of their web platform, rebuilt from the ground up on a more robust scripting framework and hosting environment. To streamline staff workflow, this new platform had to incorporate tools from multiple 3rd party services into one standard interface. Behind the Sales Teams’ dashboard sophisticated data import and exports would handle the business logic with these external providers.
In addition the public-facing shopfront of the site was in need of an update to include all the features now expected as standard in an e-commerce offering. Complete control of managing these pages would be handed over to the Telecoms World marketing team without them requiring extensive knowledge of html.
Kent web development agency Ecce Media had recently developed an 0800 number-porting microsite for Telecoms World, built within our home-grown Content Management System (CMS). Impressed by the rapid turnaround, pixel-perfect attention to detail and the ease of use of our CMS on that successful project, Telecoms World tasked Ecce Media with the rebuild of the main company website.
It was paramount in the brief that site updates be handled by our CMS, yet the scale of what the new platform would be capable of meant a significant upgrade to the CMS. Powerful ecommerce features from our shopping platform Ensemble were incorporated into the CMS together with tailor-made client and solution management modules.
As with the previous project Ecce Media worked closely with Telecoms World’s in-house design & marketing team to realise the new identity to their pixel-perfect specification. The provided Photoshop layouts were converted to standards-based html & css on a rapid turnaround to allow the marketing team to live test the user experience and amend the templates accordingly in an iterative cycle. As with our other client managed sites the template was kept modular with re-usable elements. Any sophisticated scripting required is handled transparently using plugins and smart template tags, allowing Ecce Media to ultimately hand full site content & control over to the client.
To reduce the management staff’s dependency upon multiple interfaces the new administrative dashboard needed a way to read and write to 3rd party online services. Ecce Media have partnered with their payments provider Aurora to create a bespoke API to allow for full delegation to the web platform in future releases.
The new platform now allows the Telecoms Sales teams to take and manage telephone orders, create bespoke calling solutions and add complex services via the secured site Customer Relationship Manager (CRM).
This was the third ecommerce website that Telecoms World had developed. One of the first major challenges was to ensure that existing products or services were available on the new platform and that existing orders and client data be imported safe & securely with maintained integrity. Once the database architecture was in place it was a case of making sure that the old data (in two different formats from each previous site) tallied with both the billing platform and worked in the new environment. Standardising the dataset provides us with greater options for manipulating it in the future releases.
The Ecce Media developers together with the Telecoms World accounts team spent many hours importing, refining and re-importing the previous data to ensure a continuity of services to the Telecoms World clients. Clients are now able to access orders placed previously on the legacy platforms together with their new orders as required. Clients can also access 3rd party data from the billing platform and call statistics.
As with any large ecommerce project - Ecce Media runs a parallel testing environment site (which along with the live site is constantly backed up using replication servers). All site functionality and imported data was tested alongside the older platform to ensure similar results. With testing complete the live site was flushed and the newly refined data ported across. The website was soft launched on the 17th of November to allow Telecoms World staff to help existing clients through the enhanced client area and announce their new and improved offerings.
launch: November 2011
website: www.telecomsworldplc.co.uk
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