Getting New Stores Up & Running in Record Time
Rapidly expanding flooring company Tapi Carpets were looking for a communications partner that could quickly respond to their demanding store opening schedule with fixed on-site connectivity, a customer friendly telephony system and a contingency solution to instantly enable the new business locations to function.
Customer Overview
Britain’s ‘latest and greatest’ floor coverings retailer began trading during the summer of 2015, when they opened their flagship store in Tooting, London. Since then, Tapi Carpets and Floors have opened more than 130 stores, including Homebase concessions, and continue to introduce new retail outlets each year.
Tapi offer bright and open stores packed full of refreshing displays to capture the imagination of every customer who walks through their doors. Tapi Team members are passionate about customer service, floor inspiration, and of course carpets and flooring.
The Challenge
Opening new stores takes more than good design and optimism. There are essentials to put in place too: power, mobiles, phones and internet for starters. Tapi’s aggressive schedule of branch openings – notching up as many as five in one month – demands quick thinking, responsive and innovative suppliers. None more so than those equipping the stores with vital telephony and data connectivity services. Tapi needed to find a supplier able to quickly provide fixed on-site connectivity and telephony and, if necessary, come up with a contingency solution in the meantime.
To meet the punishing store opening schedule, all work had to be completed… yesterday. It was important that a flexible, scalable, tried and tested telephony deployment model could be rolled out to every new store. Such was the pace of the project, engineers would be working alongside painters, shopfitters, electricians, and others all working towards an opening deadline.
Cloud-hosted telephony was a perfect fit with Tapi’s requirements, given that no server room or infrastructure overheads were involved. Whilst Tapi outsourced their telephony to us, they wanted to retain the ability to change call routing and recovery plans within seconds by logging on to Horizon’s Web portal – with a smartphone if necessary – to reconfigure things on the fly.
Key Solutions
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Hosted Telephony
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Mobiles
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Contact Centre
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Data Connectivity
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Mobile Device Management
What we needed from a Partner
Hear from Jason Turner, CIO at Tapi Carpets and Floors about his experience of working with Welcomm:
“It was vital we find a partner that could work collaboratively with us, help us refine things, work out call routing, failover and disaster plans, and give us confidence that we could trust them. Welcomm was just the right combination and the right size for what we needed. We have a great rapport with the people there and they have risen to the challenge of our opening schedule, sometimes working in several stores at the same time.
Now it feels like they are an extension to our own IT team – that I’ve got a number of telephony specialists who work just for me. They care as much as if they were sitting right here.”
Key Service Partners
Key Benefits
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Meeting Tapi’s aggressive roll out schedule
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Horizon hosted telephony and Welcomm installation delivered by an award winning technical support team
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Welcomm feels like an extension to Tapi’s own IT team
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Powerful failover/resilience features as standard
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Strong understanding of Tapi’s bespoke needs
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Helping Tapi quickly gain and maintain a high street presence
Added Value
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Weekly calls with the customer encourage open and honest feedback, enable Welcomm to discuss completed installations, ongoing work, upcoming installations and logged issues to see how else we can help and offer solution-focused assistance.
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Other deliverables include documentation/troubleshooting guides to assist stores with device use.
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Quarterly strategic meetings have built a strong partnership, giving Welcomm a unique insight into the business’s plans for growth, helping to ensure the proposed solutions are the best fit for Tapi’s needs both now and in the future.
A Word From Welcomm…
Since the beginning, Welcomm has successfully rolled out hosted telephony in 100+ stores, each having two hosted phone lines for customer service and management/admin respectively. Should any Internet problems occur, the system reverts to the stores’ PSTN line. If any PSTN problems occur, phones revert to a mobile data dongle. It’s a simple but effective solution to guarantee connection resilience and keep Tapi staff doing what they do best – inspiring customers to transform their homes.
Over the years, we have built a strong partnership with Tapi Carpets and Floors – my colleague Zoe and I love working closely with the team. We believe that Tapi’s success is our success too, and so we continue to demonstrate our value through weekly calls, troubleshooting queries and quarterly strategic meetings to better understand the business’s changing requirements to ensure our proposed solutions are the best fit for the growing organisation – now and in the future.
Rachael Newman
Solutions Delivery Manager
Start your journey with Welcomm…
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