The Client

First established in 600AD, St. Mary’s is a thriving Anglican church in Upton. As well as serving its local community, the church draws a congregation from across wider Wirral.

In addition to the church, St Mary’s hosts a diverse range of clubs, groups and services at its other Upton venues, The Centre and The Bank.

Business Needs

As both a popular and modern church, St Mary’s makes good use of technology to reach both physical and online congregations.

“Some of our Sunday morning services and all our family services are broadcast,” explains Operations Manager, David Steele. “We also have an event called Sundays at 7 which features somebody well-known, be it someone in the media or a high-profile businessperson, who is doing Christian charitable work.”

A lot of services and events are live-streamed and uploaded to YouTube, as well as being shown internally. “Because some of our services are that well attended, we need to have an overspill. We live broadcast a service to screens in the building so the audience can still be a part of it.”

Moreover, the church has quite a big staff team of 14 people, complemented by volunteers that use the telephone system.

However, when he took up his post, David found that the broadband and telephony platforms were well past their use-by dates. Everything was running off ISDN and PSTN connections, both of which are very much yesterday’s news.

They are not just being phased out but switched off – in January 2027 – as the communications industry turns to significantly faster digital networks, “People were surprised that that they were getting some stuttering when broadcasting,” says David, who, himself was less than amazed given the church was getting by on a 40 Mbps upload speed.

Having got in touch with Avoira – who had previously been contracted to support the church’s communication services – he also discovered that the phone system had reached end of life and could no longer be supported.

It was also clunky, with, for example, no facility for automatically switching lines to voicemail at scheduled times.

Something had to give, so David asked Avoira and other specialist providers to tender for a broadband and telephony upgrade. “We were well out of contract with Avoira and I was new in the job, so I had to look around, it would have been irresponsible not to. But Avoira’s account manager Danny Mohammed, who I dealt with, was very good.”

The decision to stick with Avoira has paid dividends, with David reporting a number of benefits.

The Solution

David already had a good idea of what was required on the broadband front. “I wanted FTTP (Fibre to the Premises) because I’d had it installed at home and the difference in broadband performance is incredible.”

From that starting point, Avoira’ pre-sales tech team recommended deployment of a speedy 300 Mbps connection together with a cloud-based 8×8 telephony platform.

This would connect to the church’s existing IP handsets, which Avoira offered to reprogramme so that they better served St. Mary’s needs. As well as hosting the church’s telephony with an enterprise grade exchange, this can support high-definition video-conferencing and offer a range of convenient and time saving features and functions.

These include call recording, routing and voicemail transcription. Because it’s hosted on the cloud, it can also deliver anywhere, anytime telephony via a range of IP enabled devices: handsets, mobiles, tablets, laptops and desktop PCs.

Asked why he chose the 8X8 system, David says he simply put his trust in the experts.

“It was the one recommended by Avoira and I don’t tend to argue with technicians. They know the technical aspects a lot better than I do so it just made sense to go with their advice.”

The switch from old to new was seamless. “It was really smooth acknowledges David.

“Getting Openreach to install to the premises was straightforward and quick, then two Avoira engineers came with the router and set it all up.

“They installed and reprogrammed everything in around half a day. The pair of them were absolutely brilliant.”

The Benefits

The ease, speed and slickness of the installation was just one benefit of the Avoira solution.

“The broadband is very good,” confirms David.

“It’s five times faster and cheaper than what we were paying previously, so for me that’s a no-brainer. Livestreaming and multi-media uploading are no longer plagued by buffering, improving the experience for both viewers and staff. It’s the same story for bulk emailing of newsletters and other communications such as St. Mary’s annual Christmas e-card. Containing information about all the church’s services and activities, it is sent to over 500 congregants.

He’s grateful too for Avoira’s help in rationalising the church’s phone network. “We looked at the phone extensions and quite a few were not being used, so I asked Avoira if we could cancel some of them and then keep particular products on the lines we kept.

“I really like the way that Avoira managed to mix and match the extension to use of the ‘phone, rather than saying every ‘phone must have this or that. It really did help us to tailor every line.”

Avoira’s engineers also programmed each extension to automatically direct calls to voicemail outside of users’ work hours. Whilst not making full use of the 8×8 system’s functionality, he’s grateful it’s there.

“We don’t really make use of the cloud-based services. I’ve just tried to put in a bit of futureproofing where the telephones are concerned,” he explains, adding that he has a longer-term plan to switch the church’s wider IT infrastructure from on-premise to cloud.

“The versatility that cloud telephony gives means that we can operate more or less from anywhere.” He’s also delighted with the speed and quality of support he receives.

“When I’ve had to ‘phone Avoira for little glitches I get straight answers right there and then. Even when we send an email I get a response giving us the solution pretty much within the hour, which is brilliant.”