At the world's fourth busiest Airport, Heathrow, Enterprise Rent-A-Car needed a solution to ensure that staff were utilised to their full potential whilst retaining best customer care levels.

Enterprise's presence at Heathrow Airport consists of a Main Car Park Office and booking desks in the three Arrivals Terminals. Due to fluctuating numbers of arriving passengers at certain times of the day, it is not cost effective to have the Terminal Desks staffed continuously during the hours that the Airport is open.

However, Enterprise also needed to utilise these staff members at the arrival terminal desks, to help answer the high volumes of inbound calls coming into the Main office. The solution suggested by Dalys was to install a single NEC SV8100 telephone server into the Main Car Park office with two NEC VoIP extensions at each of the three terminals.

The NEC InMail auto-attendant answers the incoming call and the caller is presented with a short concise list of options. They are then appropriately directed. As the VoIP extensions at the three Terminal Desk sites are part of the Main Car Park Office ring group, the NEC SV8100 allows any available staff member at any of the three arrival terminal sites to answer the call, making them part of the Main Office team and better utilising all available staff.

Should a Terminal Desk be unmanned the NEC VoIP phone is locked to prevent unauthorised use. In this situation. a Hotline phone is placed on the counter for customers' use and connected to the Main Car Park site. During the time that a Hotline phone is in use and the system phone locked, the VoIP extensions are automatically programmed to be taken out of the incoming call ring group. When a customer makes a call from the Hot Line handset, the staff member picking up that call is presented with the number of the Terminal from where the call is being made.

This solution has resulted in Enterprise customers receiving a consistently fast response to their call whether from off-site or from an unmanned terminal desk. Pressure has been alleviated from the Main Car Park office staff and has also resulted in the Terminal staff, becoming an integral part of the Heathrow Enterprise team.

As a result of the benefits this project has achieved for Enterprise Heathrow, Dalys will be implementing the same model at the Enterprise branch at Manchester Airport, in the very near future.