SThree Lifts Employee Engagement with Avaya Scopia

Instant Savings with Avaya Scopia

Global Specialist Staffing Business Thrives with Team Engagement Solution

By introducing Avaya Scopia® to enable international videoconferencing and collaboration, specialist staffing group SThree has reduced its reliance on external video bridging services, improving productivity and video quality while significantly lowering costs.

With almost fifty offices across 19 countries, SThree takes a genuinely global approach to executive search. But managing a worldwide operation brings with it significant costs. The group, which consists of four sector-specific recruitment businesses as well as the parent company, had long recognised the value of video collaboration for leadership team meetings and indeed had a handful of room systems. They knew it was time to upgrade.

Bridge Costs Building

While video was undoubtedly saving travel time and cost, it was beginning to become a large budget item in its own right.

The company’s existing approach was also inflexible, because it relied in part on room systems. Senior executives in certain time zones would have to stay very late in the office to participate in a global video call.

Finally, there were usability issues. Initial candidate screening calls were sometimes held via video, but this involved free online solutions resulting in frequent technical glitches and quality concerns.

Features and Flexibility

The costs alone provided Spencer with the business case for investing in a new, more flexible solution, and initially he anticipated simply replacing the room systems with more up-to-date solutions from the same vendor. But while in discussions with the Avaya partner that supported SThree’s voice and data network, Spencer was introduced to Scopia® and he was quickly won over.

“We really liked a lot of the features that Scopia offers,” he recalls, “such as the ability to email a direct link to the conference to all participants, and the fact that it could work across multiple devices: smartphones, tablets and even our existing room systems.”

The Value

But more than that, Scopia was an Avaya solution – and that for Spencer means a huge amount.

“That’s why we chose Avaya for our voice communications,” Spencer recalls. “The phone is how we do business: we manage 55,000 calls a day, and there’s a strong correlation between call numbers and sales. Since we moved to Avaya IP telephony four years ago, we’ve had no major outages.”

When it came to Scopia, therefore, Spencer trusted that Avaya would ensure the solution was as robust as possible, and that there would be a clear roadmap for development – a trust that has been justified.

“The executive team now relies on Scopia for their regular meetings, and it gives them enormous flexibility,”he confirms. “Managers can join from their mobile or tablet, meaning they can take part from home or on the road.” In some countries, managers now also have Avaya one-X® Mobile, offering further collaboration opportunities.

But it’s not just the senior team that have benefited. “When clients or candidates want to use video to conduct interviews, it’s much easier to manage,” Spencer acknowledges. “We just send a link to the virtual meeting room, so all participants have to do is click. Scopia consistently offers higher quality than free solutions, and there are far fewer technical problems.”

With the solution in place, the company can also use video in other ways – and Spencer’s own team has been amongst the quickest to embrace it. “We’ve used video to help installing and configuring IT equipment in new offices,” he explains.

But the most tangible benefit, undoubtedly, has been around the cost reductions. “We hit our cost saving target in the first month,” Spencer states, “and have done so every month since.” That amounts to removing a meaningful six-figure cost for the company – a substantial, visible return on the Scopia investment, with further gains still to come.