The nationwide restaurant chain dials into cost savings with Fifosys' integrated VOIP solution

Our Client

Comptoir Group plc owns and operates 24 Lebanese and Eastern Mediterranean restaurants based predominantly in England. The core restaurant brand of the Comptoir Group is Comptoir Libanais, which offers an all-day dining experience based around healthy and fresh food in a friendly, colourful and vibrant environment. Comptoir also generates franchise revenue by franchising the Comptoir Libanais brand to other restaurant operators.

The Group operates smaller Lebanese and Eastern Mediterranean outlets under the Shawa brand, serving traditional shawarmas through a service counter. In addition, the Group owns a further two standalone high-end restaurants, called Levant and Kenza.

Comptoir Group plc was admitted to the AIM market on 21 June 2016.

The Challenge

The group had gone out to tender for the Managed IT Services contract, awarded to Fifosys on a 3-year commitment.

During the onboarding phase, it was discovered that the existing MSP owned the phone system and all associated infrastructure components. As a result, Fifosys had to deploy a new telephony system within three weeks across all 24 locations.

Replacing a telephone system is a challenge as the business heavily relies on telephone bookings - something made even more problematic as it needed doing in the run-up to the Christmas period.

Our Solution

A 3CX VOIP Phone System, hosted within Microsoft Azure and capable of catering for up to 80 extensions, was installed.

3CX is a VOIP phone system with over 600,000 installations globally and used by companies including American Express, the Red Cross and the NHS. 3CX is a scalable system that can cater for any number of users, with pricing tiers available for any size of business.

3CX also allows a lot of choices regarding the SIP provider used. Where existing SIP Trunk can be imported into the system if required or custom call queues, ring groups, digital receptionists and voicemails are all 3CX features implemented for the Comptoir Group as part of this project.

Each site had a series of wired and wireless phones, installed side by side with the existing phones, ensuring business as usual would happen until porting took place.

3CX also has Microsoft Office 365 and Microsoft Teams Integration available as part of 3CX, allowing users to call directly from within the Microsoft Office 365 Suite.

The Benefits

Reduced costs in the following areas:

• Due to 3CX’s billing model where you pay for the number of simultaneous calls at any time, not the number of extensions required
• Reduced SIP call costs
• Low Hosting costs
• Free calling to other extensions within the 3CX system

In addition, several phones at sites had broken in the past and had not been replaced - our new system removed this issue.

Bonus Benefits

• Monitoring of the system. Alerts are generated when issues such as outages, hacking attempts, calls to premium numbers are made or when monthly call charges rise.
• Increased resiliency. A mobile/web/desktop app is available now to ensure calls can be answered when away from the site or in case an internet line goes down.
• SIP trunks can be changed if ever required to ensure low costs and that the best deal on them is always obtained.