Abbey Business Centres is an award-winning provider of serviced offices and virtual office facilities in the UK for a range of businesses, from small start-ups to larger enterprises. Its 13 business centres are located in London, Middlesex, Surrey, Berkshire, Manchester, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Amsterdam. It offers customers a range of support services including a staffed reception, call answering and secretarial services, meeting room hire, as well as IT and telecoms support.

One of its largest business expenses is the telecoms services it provides for its customers, which accounts for a significant proportion of its annual budget.

Challenges facing Abbey Business Centres

When the company expanded by 10% in March 2006, adding a prestigious new 2500 m² facility in London’s “Gherkin”, it decided to review its entire telecoms services to see if it could drive down telephony costs, whilst improving the quality of services it offered to its clients. 

Abbey Business Centres also wanted to appoint a single supplier for all its voice services that could guarantee high quality lines to service all its centres across the UK and in Europe cost-effectively.  By choosing to work with one supplier, it hoped to reduce administration and to simplify its billing processes and receive just one monthly bill.

The company also wanted to reassure its customers of the high levels of service they could expect so it was important to select a provider that could offer 24/7 support service provided by trained engineers. This would mean that if there were any disruptions to the services, the problems could be fixed immediately in order to minimise any business downtime. 

Finally, it needed its services installed quickly to ensure customers’ telecoms services were up and running as soon as they moved into the office.  It was essential therefore to find a company willing to work flexibly, quickly and efficiently to ensure the job was completed in the designated time frame.

Selecting a New Supplier

Following a competitive tender process, Telstra Europe was chosen to provide and manage voice services for Abbey Business Centres’ international network of business centres.

Telstra understood the company’s business requirements and was able to provide the right service at the right price.  A further attraction was the quality of Telstra’s services including dedicated account management and 24-hour technical support.

Julie Calder, Managing Director, Abbey Business Centres commented, “There are many synergies between Telstra and Abbey. Unlike its competitors, Telstra adopted a consultative approach rather than a hard sell and proposed the right blend of services at the right cost.  Its technical specialists took the time to really understand our business needs and its account management team was attentive and responsive.”

The service installation was managed seamlessly and efficiently by Telstra, without any of Abbey Business Centres’ customers experiencing any downtime or business interruption.

 Calder continued, “Telstra installed all the required voice services in just one day at our new state-of-the-art facilities in The Gherkin, which was pivotal in enabling us to keep to our opening schedule and meet the needs of our clients.”

Business Benefits

Abbey Business Centres is now benefiting from more competitive call rates, guaranteed levels of service, 24/7 customer support, rapid software installation for new office sites, online billing facilities and a dedicated account management team.  In 2006, its business with Telstra accounted for almost 70% of telephony spend and it also helped Abbey improve its profit margin on voice services by almost 10%, compared with 2005.

Telstra is now working with Abbey Business Centres to develop an implementation strategy for the roll-out of next generation converged VoIP communication services this year.

Calder added, “We are extremely happy with the services we receive from Telstra. The company can adapt to the challenges we face and is able to provide new services like VoIP which our customers are keen to adopt in the near future. We value the quality of its telecoms services provided and the dedicated support we receive. We look forward to developing our partnership further this year.”

Simon Vye, CEO of Telstra Europe, concluded, “Telstra Europe is delighted to support Abbey Business Centres as it grows in the UK and Europe and look forward to a continued excellent working relationship. The market for serviced offices in the UK is booming.  However, customers not only expect their office facilities to include high quality facilities, they demand the most up to date technology, telecoms services and networking connectivity to run their businesses successfully.”