Networking and comms infrastructure refresh for Godfreys

Iconic 90-year-old specialty retailer Godfreys has completed a major networking and telecommunications infrastructure refresh across its 130 stores in Australia and New Zealand.

The refresh included the rollout of nbn, SD-WAN and enterprise Wi-Fi, together with a RingCentral unified communications-as-a-service (UCaaS) platform, which has also been deployed in Godfreys’ support office, call centres and distribution centre in Melbourne.

Godfreys is one of the world’s largest speciality retailers of domestic and commercial floor care and associated cleaning products, with 520 permanent staff operating from 130 stores plus another 64 franchised outlets. The two-year project has reinvigorated Godfreys’ retail presence and customer experience.

The company now has a single voice platform across the 130 stores it owns and operates, supporting rapid remote provisioning of telephony to new sites, allowing Godfreys to adopt a hybrid working model for its office-based staff and improving customer service and queue management in its call centres.

The recently opened superstore in the inner-west Sydney suburb of Auburn is the epitome of that transformation, featuring an open and accessible in-store experience for customers and giving its retail staff the freedom to move around using cordless UC handsets over Wi-Fi.

With redundant links and in-house management of the store-wide SD-WAN and RingCentral platform, the company doesn’t have to wait for the carrier to fix the outage or provide a workaround for any line failures — which had been a big problem, especially in regional store locations. It has also removed Godfreys’ reliance on service providers to commission new telephony services or reconfigure any hardware for any new stores or store relocations.

“To move telecommunications across to a new store used to take up to eight weeks to complete. Now it’s literally sending an SD-WAN router and phone handsets to the store; the new devices log on with credentials and that’s it. We can have a store up and running in the time it takes for a courier to deliver the hardware,” said Godfreys Infrastructure Manager Mike Malyshev.

While Godfreys had no plans to implement a flexible working environment for its office-based teams, that all changed when Melbourne went into its first lockdown in March 2020. While most of the store network had yet to be rolled out, the company already had its RingCentral UCaaS solution installed in its head office and distribution centre, making it an easy transition to remote working during that lockdown and subsequent lockdowns, and allowing Godfreys to adjust permanently to a new working environment.

“When we received the first lockdown notice and we had to close the office, the whole team just picked up their laptops, went home and continued doing exactly the same job,” said Malyshev.

“RingCentral has made possible all these flexible working arrangements and working from home, without any additional investments, cost, delays or downtime.”

RingCentral Live Reports has given Godfreys’ centralised customer service and support call centre teams greater insight and analytics into call queue performance and key metrics. Together with easily configurable IVRs and call queueing and routing features, that’s led to improvements in call centre structure and functionality, and overall performance. Managers can now easily define agents’ roles and assign them to multiple queues from RingCentral’s management portal. The Live Reports dashboard provides visibility and insight that managers can use to make adjustments in functionality, and change the design of the call queues and call routing to improve overall performance.

It has also enabled the Godfreys IT team to be more responsive, with change requests from the stores actioned in the same business day. In the past, when Godfreys was reliant on its telecommunications provider for PABX changes, those change requests would take days or weeks to action.

“Now IT has become invisible to retail; computers, lines and phones just work for them. It’s done silently and quietly on the back end, exactly how IT should be,” said Malyshev.