Empowered & Orderwork Partner with Adooa to Deliver Integrated and Flexible Business Communications
The following is taken from an Interview by Charlotte May from Adooa of David Jault, Business Support Manager for Empowered and Orderwork.
David ensures the right tools and services are available for company employees, as part of his role in assuring contracts and compliance within the business. He selected Adooa as a partner in 2018 and has managed our relationship since then.
Background
Empowered and Orderwork deliver IT and technology services to a wide range of channel providers, including service providers, resellers, web and high street retailers, and systems integrators. Their services span IT system design, smart home technology installation, Wi-Fi expertise, and project delivery for both large-scale and ad hoc requirements.
The business employs around 60 people and manages hundreds of subcontractors, serving environments as diverse as government departments, high street retail, manufacturing, warehousing, corporate offices, and private homes.
“We deliver fixed outcomes in volume, installation projects big and small, we design networks and IT systems, install smart home technology, provide resource on demand, and other services.”
The Importance of Communication
For Empowered and Orderwork, clear and reliable communication is essential to business operations. They operate a service desk and have service engineers to co-ordinate.
“Communications technology is very important: we must be easy to communicate with for our client businesses and the end users who we support.”
While email and Microsoft Teams are widely used, David points out the continuing importance of voice calls:
“Within our industry, we’re kind of tied to email because it’s a way of communicating documents and messages, but really, sometimes it’s just good to talk, isn’t it?”
He adds: “On a more ad hoc basis, if we want to talk to one of our suppliers who’s driving to site, you’ve got to get them on a voice call. The flexibility of the phone system means we can ring him from our service desk number — and they’ll know who is calling.”
Partnership with Adooa
Why Adooa?
The company first engaged with Adooa (formerly VOIspeed Ltd) in 2018.
“This was a competitive situation — they won based on cost and business understanding. We did know VOIspeed from previous services delivered a few years earlier.”
OrderWork needed enterprise-grade communication features without the cost and complexity of running an on-premises solution.
“As an SME, we did not want to host our system but needed a big business toolset, all at a good per-seat price. We needed to be flexible in the number of users — both up as well as down, easy to add and subtract users.”
Consultancy & Support
Adooa’s team quickly established themselves as trusted advisors:
“They’re approachable and helpful, questioning us when they need to; we trust them to do the right thing.”
During a major migration to Xelion software, Adooa’s expertise was invaluable:
“Because of their familiarity with both the new and old phone system, we were able to trust them with all the details of the work without needing to deal with the detail ourselves.”
David praised Adooa’s ability to simplify technical complexity:
“At Adooa, simple explanations are used to describe the complex subjects that only telecoms professionals may understand — they have a good reading of the audience.”
Migration to Xelion
The Need for Change
The legacy phone system had become limited with integrations and flexibility:
A critical requirement was integration with Microsoft Teams, which remained essential for their largest clients and Power BI another Microsoft product. They also required integration with Payguard for the security of their phone credit card payments.
“Adooa were able to propose Xelion and it did indeed fit our needs.”
Smooth Transition
The rollout of the new Xelion was straightforward, with minimal disruption:
“We were able to load the new phone clients on all the laptops ahead of time and send out instructions. The user interface is modern and simple, so I didn’t really have to tell them very much.”
David provided a few tips to help colleagues make best use of the features: “I pushed out a few FAQs because I was afraid that people weren’t taking best advantage of it.”
The integration with Microsoft Teams was immediate and power BI after a couple of weeks.
Valuable Features
Key features that stood out for Orderwork included:
- MS Teams integration:
“If you’re on a Teams voice call, the last thing you want is your soft phone ringing on your desk — it takes over all the audio and it’s annoying.” The current system means that they are only on one voice call at a time.
- Flexibility across devices:
“The Xelion app is quite nice and flexible — it can sit small in the corner of your screen, and it runs on mobile really well.”
- Integration with Power BI
This integration wasn’t initially key to the change, but has been a valuable addition. Power BI tracks the accounts, sales , CRM and now telephone conversations: “So if I want to know the performance of a particular client, I can on one page look at how they’re getting on with sales, with invoicing, day to day delivery within our CRM and now how many phone calls we’re making with them all on the same report. So, it’s really versatile! We can generate corporate phone reporting on an enterprise reporting platform.”
Trusted Execution
“Because we know your support guys (Adooa), we’re just happy to leave them to it. We trust them to get on with it.”
“The software is quite intuitive, and we rely on your support team to get the two systems running in parallel and then you’ve got the big the big switch day when you route all the calls to the new system and it works.”
Results & Value Delivered
- Improved Communication & Reporting
The Xelion phone system integrated with Power BI has brought better business intelligence:
“We check phone usage hourly — it’s a live API between the back-end data and our Power BI. It means we’ve got access to the source data within a platform that we understand well.”
This has streamlined customer service and performance tracking:
“If a customer rings in and wants an appointment change, they’ll have pressed that option on their IVR. That call record then appears in our Power BI reporting. It gives us business intelligence that is key.”
- PCI-Compliant Payments
By integrating Payguard, Orderwork ensured secure credit card handling:
“It completely removes our operators from having to deal with any credit card information at all. It’s a really good solution.”
- Enterprise-Grade at SME Cost
“For under £20 per head a month, you’re getting what would cost hundreds of thousands with a Cisco or Mitel system. It behaves like a hundred-person call centre”
Trust & Future Collaboration
David is clear about the ongoing value of working with Adooa:
“There was enough confidence there that I didn’t go looking for alternatives.”
“You’re easy to work with. The last thing I want as a small business is to be dwarfed by a massive supplier — I wouldn’t even bother with this sort of call if you weren’t easy as people to work with.”
He also praised Adooa’s modern approach to cloud-based telephony:
“You’re doing a good job of a proper cloud computing approach to voice — elastic, scalable, and resilient.”
