The business
Avery Healthcare is one of the largest care home providers in the UK, offering outstanding care to residents living in their homes.
The problem
Avery first contacted CTR during lockdown. It was imperative that their staff could continue to work from home. But their current set-up and phone system didn’t allow for this.
Reliant on an ISDN system at their Head Office, they realised that change was needed. Fast. Not least because of the ISDN and PSTN switch off in 2025.
In addition, there was a problem with staff being taken away from their care duties to answer calls. Hence, a solution was needed whereby calls are prioritised and handled much more efficiently.
As an IT Manager, I’ve always viewed phone systems as a necessity but sometimes doesn’t receive the attention it requires. Our opinions quickly changed as lockdown loomed. As an organisation, we have tended to have physical PBXs at locations which haven’t provided the flexibility we have needed, however they have done the job. With lockdown in mind, we were in desperate need to migrate from an old ISDN30 on-site PBX with no ability for our teams to take calls from home, and required a scalable, robust solution to accommodate.
CTR truly came to the rescue and provided handsets, along with VOIP licensing and expert advice to get us out of a truly sticky situation, and all of this at a fraction of the price we were expecting to pay. Especially given the desperate circumstances! We were up and running on VOIP and had handsets delivered, users trained on handsets and softphone apps, all within a week of asking. It was fantastic service, and I still can’t thank them enough for the work that was put in for us.
Our working relationship has grown considerably since then, and we are almost finished migrating over 60 locations from physical PBX’s and traditional ISDN lines to hosted VOIP handsets. As an organisation we were extremely conscious of the analogue / ISDN switch off in 2025 and wanted to be ahead of the curve, and the team at CTR guided us to ensure this was done as smoothly as possible and ensuring there was no risk to our business operations.
Since then, we have reviewed our services elsewhere in the organisation and CTR have proved to have competitive pricing on broadband and fixed lines. With this in mind, we are now in the process of migrating over 200 broadband & fixed lines to CTR as I trusted the process would be handled perfectly by the team, with no risk. This also ensures all billing is consolidated within one supplier and saves me and our accounts team a chunk of work processing and approving invoices!
We are delighted to have CTR as a preferred supplier and only wish we had found them sooner!
Matthew King, IT Manager, Avery Healthcare
The solution
Our first port of call was, of course, to provide rapid help during the pandemic. When Avery reached out during lockdown, we made sure 20 VoIP phones were shipped and set up the next day.
Since then, we have implemented a large-scale plan to ensure the homes operate more efficiently.
Avery now have a highly resilient cloud-based hosted phone system at their Head Office. Having seen how efficient and reliable VoIP phones are, there was no going back.
CTR created a HUB within the group to stop each of the care home sites receiving too many calls. The HUB is a professional team that can answer questions about any of the Avery care homes. This new system means the team now know which care home the call is coming from – so they are instantly more prepared.
And because it’s a cloud-based system the HUB can transfer calls internally to any of the homes and vice versa. They can also directly dial the person they need to speak to. This avoids having to call reception and consequently saves time.
The Auto Attendant feature on each care home’s main line allows the caller to select if they want to speak to the home directly or if they are calling for prices and availability.
Now, carers do not need to stop work to answer the phone unnecessarily.
The future
Avery and CTR are now working together to move the phone systems in all the care homes to the cloud.
This will mean that every phone in the home has its own line. Therefore, calls can always be made. More importantly, calls to emergency services are not delayed if and when they are required.
There is also a plan to ensure the routers in the care homes are set to prioritise VoIP calls going through the internet.
In addition, we aim to install two broadband connections in each home with different carriers to optimise resilience as much as possible.
Superior quality DrayTek routers will automatically switch from one connection to the other if there is an issue.
