Case study: Scenic Tours

How we helped a national travel company implement new technology to enhance customer and staff experiences.

Overview

Scenic Tours needed a network provider that could not only minimise delays and reduce the cost of its communication requirements, but also improve its IT infrastructure to help grow its national and international operations.

Scenic Tours

Industry: Travel
Solution: IP Transit

Challenge

  • Minimise network delays
  • Improve IT infrastructure to scale as needed
Outcome
  • Dramatic improvement in communications network
  • Ability to grow IT and business operations to enhance customer and staff experiences

Minimising delays and reducing costs.

Based in Newcastle in New South Wales, Scenic Tours has more than 300 employees as well as a range of partnerships with local, national, and international travel groups and companies.

Communication between Scenic Tours’ national offices and its international stakeholders is vital to the everyday operations of the organisation.

However, relying on a single direct fibre connection between its Sydney and Newcastle offices meant that not only was the company suffering exorbitant network and communication costs but also associated issues with network delays and challenges cooling its overworked Newcastle server.

The challenge

The old network also utilised a managed service provider for its firewall which resulted in major delays if any configuration changes were needed.

Scenic Tours wanted to find a network provider that could work with its internal IT team to not only minimise delays and reduce the cost of the organisation’s communication requirements, but also improve the IT infrastructure holistically to allow the company to continue to expand and grow its national and international operations.

Scenic Tours selected Vocus as its telecommunications partner for its competitive pricing, round the clock support and ability to take Scenic Tours’ IT infrastructure to the next level.

What did Scenic Tours have to say about us?

“Since working with Vocus we no longer have to rely on a single direct fibre connection. We have been able to reduce network costs, improve networking reliability and eliminate our server cooling issues as Vocus also offered a colocation data centre service.”

Steve Morris, IT Group Manager
Scenic Tours

Reducing costs while enhancing the network

Within 12 months of beginning work with Vocus, Scenic Tours saw a dramatic improvement in its communications network, installing an MPLS WAN which saw connection quality triple from 50Mbps to 150Mbps.

“Using the Vocus IP transit product we are also able to significantly improve configurability with the application of HA firewalls which resulted in less downtime and significantly fewer network delays for our staff.”

The partnership with Vocus also allowed Scenic Tours to continue to grow its IT and business operations including implementing new technology to enhance customer and staff experiences.

“We wanted to move up a gear with our IT infrastructure and also continue to grow our operations into new areas,” said Steve.

“Vocus worked with us to solve our network challenges and implement EG, business productivity software that supports our communications as a service (CaaS) call centre and is powered by interactive intelligence," he said.

"This kind of technology not only helps our staff to manage the volume of incoming calls and activity, but allows us to serve our customers and our stakeholders much more efficiently.”

Extending the network to the future

Since working with Vocus, Scenic Tours has also been able to alleviate some of the pressure on its small internal IT team thanks to the constant support and advice from the Vocus network consultants.

“We have a very small IT department so working with Vocus allows us to unburden our IT team and instead lean on the Vocus team for support and services," said Steve.

"When we faced an outage due to severe storms in Sydney in April this year, Vocus was first on the phone to lend a hand and manage the issue with urgency and that’s the kind of service Vocus offers at all times.”

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