Fremantle Dockers

With 40,000, members and 500 corporate partners, the Fremantle Dockers, is one of the most strongly supported clubs in the Australian Football League (AFL). During the peak membership-renewal period, the West Australian club receives hundreds of calls each day, which are all fielded by an expanded 8-person call centre.

“The ShoreTel install proved trouble-free with no disruptions to club operations. There was no need for extensive training as ShoreTel IP telephony is very intuitive and easy to use.”- Alan Doyle, IT Manager, Emeco

— Minh Tran, IT Manager, Fremantle Dockers

Communications are critical for the Fremantle Dockers, particularly during a busy member-renewal campaign and the six months outside the formal football season when day-to-day operations and planning are underway.

However, due to an aging PBX system that offered poor visibility across Fremantle’s telephone service, the club had little insight into the status of calls, system bottlenecks, or service needs. It needed a communications system that could boost the quality of its customers’ experience, and improve its off-field performance.

“The visibility across the system provides us with data to improve operations performance. We are now able to better plan staffing for critical periods, identify inquiry areas that may need additional resourcing, and more efficiently handle requests for merchandise - a major cash flow source to the club.”

— Minh Tran, IT Manager, Fremantle Dockers

During the RFP process, ShoreTel demonstrated its easy-to-use features and the management simplicity of the highly reliable distributed architecture. These benefits gave the ShoreTel UC solution an edge over its competitors, and after a thorough evaluation, Fremantle selected a ShoreTel solution comprising ShoreTel Voice Switches, ShoreTel IP Phones and ShoreTel Communicator for the desktop with Mobile Communicator access. Benefits include:

• Stronger visibility supports call center expansion to handle peaks in traffic, including the club’s critical annual member-subscription renewal period.
• The system easily scales to expand from the Fremantle headquarters to the Melbourne office at little additional cost other than handsets.
• All calls to and from its interstate office are at no charge, and by using the ShoreTel system, frontline customer service and administration can be supported from the head office.
• Email Integration with Microsoft Outlook is seamless, and employees can make or take calls from their desktop or handset.

“ShoreTel enables mobile users to manage their communications from their Blackberry and other popular smart phones, something our highly mobile workers simply love. And because ShoreTel easily integrates with legacy PBX systems, we’ve been able to keep deployment costs and total cost of ownership low by leveraging existing investments. At the same time, we have a modern, reliable and highly efficient unified communications system. ShoreTel has helped us exceed our goal and put us ahead of the game!

— Minh Tran, IT Manager, Fremantle Dockers