Camelot Case Study
Background
Camelot is the operator of the UK National Lottery, employing around 950 staff who work from a head office in Watford, Hertfordshire and four
regional centres across the UK. The company was recently ranked 76th in the Sunday Times Top 100 list of the Best Companies to Work For. The company runs one of the most cost-efficient lotteries in the world, with around 5 percent of total revenue taken in operating costs and
returning a higher proportion of lottery revenue back to society than any other lottery operator in the world. To date, over £16.5 billion has been raised by The National Lottery, benefiting more than 190,000 individual projects across the UK in the biggest programme of civic and social regeneration since the 19th Century.
Mark Nash is Telecoms Manager for Camelot, the operator of the UK National Lottery. Camelot employs around 1,000 staff and operates from a network of 25,000 retailers and 4 regional offices, all focussed on a time sensitive business where network availability is central to the running of the operation and delivery of customer services.
Over a period of years, Mark has turned to Daisy for an increasing number of services. He explains why:
Q/ Where have you made the biggest impact on costs?
A/ Two years ago, Daisy identified that our office-tomobile calls were incurring excessive costs and contributing significantly to the growth of our monthly call charges. With their knowledge of tariffs and their ability to negotiate rates with the major carriers, Daisy created a solution based on least cost routing. As a result, we estimate that we have since reduced our office-to-mobile call costs by about 25% to 30%, amounting to savings of many thousands of pounds.Even with the more recent reductions in mobile tariffs, we’re still making big savings. Office to mobile tariffs have simply moved from being ‘very expensive’ to just plain ‘expensive’.
So there’s still plenty of room for making savings, particularly when mobile usage is still growing so rapidly.
Q/ How have you tackled reducing the cost of your fixed line calls?
A/ Both carriers and resellers are delivering extremely competitive rates these days, so it’s no simple task to achieve significant cost savings. However, as a result of Daisy’s success with our savings on office to mobile calls, we let them look at the rest of our call charges and have been with their ability to get rates down. Daisy now manages our outbound calls from all our regional sites and has also taken over our international traffic – that’s data as well as voice.Daisy’s success stems from their experience of working with carriers, knowing where to get the best tariffs and knowing how to negotiate. Not many service providers have that capability.
Amongst their carrier relationships, Daisy has an accredited BT Wholesale Partnership. This means that they can manage and bill almost all the services offered by BT, including network access and line rentals. It was on this basis that they put forward a proposal for management of our analogue lines to our national network of retailers. With around 25,000 lines, we are a BT Platinum Partner and one of the biggest of their line owners. So we were pleasantly surprised when Daisy came back to us with significant cost savings.
Consequently, have started to transfer line management to them.
Q/ So how do you view Daisy’s key role - is it simply cost management?
A/ Not at all. Daisy has demonstrated their capability in reducing tariffs and call costs but they also deliver great value in managing the administration that goes with this type of work.As our relationship with Daisy has evolved over the past two years, it has become apparent that there is real financial benefit to Camelot in having a single service provider to support our telecoms management. We turned to Daisy for a broad range of services that demand the time and expertise that we simply don’t have inhouse.
For example, Daisy now organises mobile and broadband requirements for home workers, Directors, sales people, etc. This is where Daisy excels - bringing
together a range of services and providing me with one point of contact. It makes my life a lot simpler, allowing me to focus on managing other priorities, and it saves the company money in terms of administration and personnel costs.
Q/ How do you see your telecoms service requirements developing in the future?
A/ Our business is highly regulated and increasingly reliant upon our business communications. In this environment, the cost and support of our telecommunications technology will become an increasingly critical management challenge. Consequently, I anticipate that telecoms management will rely on the experience of specialist service providers all the more and will need to work with them in close partnership. It’s about keeping abreast of new
developments and pro-actively suggesting improvements to the service.
Just recently, Daisy demonstrated the value of this approach when setting up a dedicated link for our main mobile carrier and installing a GSM Gateway to handle the other mobile traffic from the office. I just don’t have the time to keep up to speed with that kind of technology, and it’s that kind of service that is going to be so valuable in the future.
Daisy is a leading provider of integrated voice and data services to more than 75,000 customers in the UK business market. Providing a combined product set, including managed data access, hosting, voice, systems and mobile telephony, Daisy’s wide portfolio of services enables customers to consolidate their supply chain for telecoms, reducing the day to day management overheads of supporting multiple suppliers. This also aids with cost control as by bundling services, we have the ability to reach an extremely competitive price point.
Industry leading service and support are at the centre of Daisy’s ethos, with Dedicated Service Managers and support teams available 24x7 for support escalations, as well as providing comprehensive service reports on a frequent basis.
