Clerksroom

Clerksroom Enterprise calling in Microsoft Teams enhances user experience and simplifies infrastructure for Clerksroom's voice services.

Clerksroom is a national chambers of barristers and mediators providing advocacy, advice and mediation at all Courts and Tribunals in England and Wales.

Clerksroom was launched in 2001 with the objective of providing proactive, client-focused legal services. It is an environment and a culture where barristers and clerks can work together in a way that guarantees the consistent delivery of a high quality and cost-effective legal service.

The Challenge

During the first Covid-19 lockdown, when most organisations switched to remote working, Clerksroom Barristers Chambers (Clerksroom) decided that they wanted to use Microsoft Teams for voice calls too. They were heavily invested in Microsoft and wanted more integration, control and centralisation from their phone system, having realised that their legacy VoiP system lacked features and functionality. They needed to find a partner with an excellent reputation and strong pedigree for deploying business voice solutions, which is why they turned to Croft.

The Solution

Microsoft Teams Phone has to connect to the public telephony network, either using Calling Plans or via Direct Routing Services. Putting their trust in Croft, we deployed Direct Routing into a third-party hosting provider’s data centre that Clerksroom was already using, highlighting Croft’s flexibility and experience in multi-vendor deployments. Croft also ported the existing phone numbers from the legacy VoiP system and onto Microsoft Teams. The connection between the SIP trunk and the Microsoft 365 Business Voice is achieved using a virtual Session Border Controller (SBC), which allows Clerksroom to make external calls using Teams.

Croft also suggested installing a SIP Trunk Call Manager for added functionality. It not only gives Clerksroom business continuity, but it also means that they can manage all their phone numbers and all aspects of their inbound calls, such as setting up queues and redirecting calls. Croft set up the failover system for external numbers so that Clerksroom would have ‘business as usual’ resilience if the internet or servers went down.

They explored various endpoints and devices and decided on a combination of Teams desk phones and headsets for added flexibility. The final part of the new system deployment was user and admin training, also carried out by Croft’s in-house trainer. Croft manage any ongoing support issues for Clerksroom and as yet, there have been none.

The number porting was seamless and could not have gone any better. Clerksroom had tried to port the numbers to another provider about a year ago and had struggled with it so I was expecting issues, however I was pleasantly surprised with how smoothly it went with Croft. Microsoft 365 Business Voice is working well and is very user-friendly. This new business telephony system has improved the user experience and has really helped to simplify our IT infrastructure.

Toby Ward
Business Services Manager of Clerksroom

The Results

One of the main benefits of migrating their voice services to Teams is that Clerksroom can also integrate their purpose-built ‘Case Management System’ (CMS) for critical ops with Microsoft. They already integrate Office 365 for emails with the CMS and now they can also link the telephony solution. All phone numbers are incorporated into the CMS with hyperlinks so it’s remarkably simple and easy to use. It saves the clerks a lot of time as they no longer have to find phone numbers – they can just click and go.