Centralised Booking System
“Thanks to RTS the number of calls answered first time have increased from around 33% to 95%. This has helped us speed up service considerably and not worry about the phones going down”
Colin Wilson, Head of Sales
For nearly 20 years, RTS and Stonegate have fostered a strong, collaborative relationship, dating back to when Stonegate was known as the Laurel Pub Company. Initially driven by the need for private broadband connections linking approximately 600-650 pub sites, RTS was there from the start, providing vital IT support. As Stonegate grew and transformed into a leading pub retailer, RTS adapted its services to meet the evolving needs of Stonegate’s expanding IT infrastructure.
In its early years, the relationship between RTS and Stonegate was primarily transactional. However, with Stonegate’s growth, the complexity of its infrastructure increased, prompting the need for a more proactive and strategic relationship. When Karl Kusta joined Stonegate in 2013, RTS saw an opportunity to align their efforts with Stonegate’s vision for IT investment, which called for deeper collaboration and strategic service reviews.
RTS played a key role in shifting Stonegate’s approach from reactive to proactive. As part of this transition, RTS was integrated early into project discussions, ensuring their expertise informed major IT initiatives from the outset. A significant milestone came in 2015 with the roll-out of Wi-Fi across Stonegate’s venues.
This project marked a pivotal moment, cementing RTS’s role not just as a service provider but as a trusted advisor in Stonegate’s IT transformation. Over the years, RTS has worked hard to foster trust and transparency with Stonegate.
This has been demonstrated through taking ownership of incidents, maintaining transparent communication, and learning from mistakes to continuously improve.
Transitioned from a transactional to a strategic partnership.
Proactive service reviews and early project collaboration.
Long-term trust and accountability, evolving into a collaborative IT transformation journey.
As Stonegate’s IT and networking needs grew, RTS continuously adapted its services to provide reliable, high-performance network support. Notably, the deployment of Ideal Comms in 2017 significantly improved network uptime and resilience, providing a foundation to support Stonegate’s technological advancements.
Stonegate required an agile, resilient network capable of supporting new technologies such as mobile POS, PEDs, body cams, and streaming services. The integration of multiple technologies, along with maintaining network security and uptime, presented significant challenges, particularly across a growing number of pub sites.
RTS worked closely with Stonegate to develop and implement a comprehensive, high-availability network. The roll-out of Ideal Comms replaced outdated configurations and significantly enhanced network uptime. Key to this deployment was the ability to support high-demand applications and integrate with third-party providers such as Zonal and Microsoft Azure for seamless cloud connectivity.
RTS also maintained an open and collaborative working relationship with Stonegate’s technical teams, ensuring real-time communication and fast issue resolution. Together, RTS and Stonegate introduced solutions like 4G and 5G routers, which ensured continuous operations even during network disruptions, providing robust fallback capabilities.
- Successful deployment of Ideal Comms, ensuring network resilience.
- Effective integration of new technologies, including mobile POS and streaming services.
- Continuous collaboration between RTS and Stonegate’s technical teams, enhancing network flexibility
RTS has consistently delivered exceptional service desk support to Stonegate, handling a high volume of requests and ensuring minimal downtime across Stonegate’s UK-wide operations. RTS’s deep understanding of Stonegate’s infrastructure enables the team to proactively address potential issues before they impact business operations.
Managing IT services across Stonegate’s vast network of sites, with a wide range of technologies in play, required a service desk capable of delivering swift, efficient support. Balancing the need for high responsiveness while maintaining seamless communication and operational continuity was an ongoing challenge.
RTS’s service desk team manages around 1,000 tickets monthly, with a significant portion of service outages identified and addressed proactively through monitoring systems. This approach ensures high-priority issues are resolved before they affect site operations. For example, RTS deployed mobile data solutions to enable Stonegate’s MSOs to continue trading during system outages.
A key aspect of this success has been the strong partnership and trust built between RTS and Stonegate’s technical teams. The service desk is integrated into Stonegate’s broader IT strategy, allowing for quicker resolutions and ensuring that all personnel, from service desk operators to senior technical staff, are aligned and focused on operational excellence.
- Proactive service monitoring and issue identification, reducing downtime.
- Integration of mobile data solutions to ensure continuity during outages.
- Close collaboration between RTS and Stonegate’s technical teams for fast issue resolution.
Stonegate Pub Company own and manage around 800 pub and restaurant venues across a wide range of formats from community and high street pubs to late night venues. Customers calling venues for a table booking often found that their call was unanswered, resulting in a poor customer experience and a potential loss of business to competitors.
Staff in the venues were taking time away from serving the customers within the venue to answer the phone, and messages left on the site phone number were not always called back in a timely manner.
After considering options, Stonegate decided that a central booking function would both increase the number and speed of calls being answered as well as freeing up staff in the venues to serve customers.
Having worked with Stonegate for around 10 years providing both telephony and data connectivity, RTS were the logical choice to help Stonegate.
RTS worked with the central bookings project team to design and implement a new contact centre from the ground up. Previously unused office space was repurposed with desks for 37 people and RTS installed new power, data cabling and electronic wallboards to display real time information from the telephony platform. The majority of sites were already running RTS VoIP telephony however a number of sites were still running analogue telephony services – these were migrated to the VoIP platform as part of the project.
Customers are now presented with a simple menu based on Integrated Voice Response (IVR) when calling, asking them to press 1 for bookings or 2 to speak to the venue directly. Calls for bookings are then routed to the central bookings function where the call is answered by the contact centre team and the customer helped through the booking process then directed to a third party payment system to take deposits.
Almost immediately after the Slug and Lettuce brand transitioned to central bookings the number of calls answered first time increased from around 33% to 95%.
Other brands in the portfolio quickly followed once the success of the project had been proven. With Walkabout, Yates, Venues, Common Rooms, Sport Bar and Grill and the rooms for the Hotel and Inn businesses now reaping the benefits of the central booking service. Within 4 months of Go-Live the team are now booking 3000 covers a week.
Customers have a better level of service with calls being answered by trained staff that understand the booking process, can give helpful advice and confirm bookings immediately rather than having to wait for a call back from one of the venues. Managers and staff, now free from the burden of answering the phone during busy times can focus on serving customers.
Abandoned calls are now placed into a queue for staff to call back, ensuring that all customers are contacted in a timely manner and bookings can be completed.
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