Paris Gallery chooses Avaya and EMW as convergence partners

As a rapidly expanding retail business, Paris Gallery realized that installing world-class communications systems could improve individual employee productivity, without location-based constraints, and therefore improve the overall customer experience.

Paris Gallery has a revolutionized retail approach to brand design and merchandising. Each showroom is staffed by consultants working directly for renowned cosmetic companies. Customers can call upon the overall expertise of the Paris Gallery staff to direct them to the specialized knowledge offered by the individual consultants. The challenge faced by the communications team was to ensure that these consultants were able to stay in constant contact with Paris Gallery head office as well as the showrooms, while keeping the whole organization 'dial plan 'centralized, i.e. extension to extension dialing, to ensure easy roll out and proactive management of the overall systems.

'As one of the leading retail brands in the UAE, it is important that our employees are efficient and informed at all times, to assist customers and keep business flowing smoothly in every showroom,' commented Abdullah Thabit, IT Director, Paris Gallery. 'Rolling out Avaya across our showrooms offered us a streamlined approach to our voice, contact center and unified communications. Our business and engineering team can now collaborate and manage all moves, adds and changes across all showrooms with minimum on site intervention. The Paris Gallery experience is what keeps us distinctive and special to our high-net worth customers, and a key element of this is delivering top quality communications to the premium brands that display goods in our stores. Avaya and EMW enabled us to keep our staff, and brands consultants, in constant contact with each other,almost in real-time.'

Avaya partner EMW implemented the Avaya IP Telephony solution across Paris Gallery's showrooms, including the brand new ones, some of which are the largest in UAE. The Avaya system with the underlying infrastructure was ready to service customers in just two days, ensuring minimal impact on footfall and therefore, sales. One of the key elements of their choice was the end to end service and support offered by partner EMW. Connecting remote employees and showrooms alike, 'Avaya's Local Survivable Processor (LSP) technology implemented provided full redundancy, availability, and scalability, a true 5 9s that is backed by Avaya Labs.
Leveraging technology to drive their business has been a key element of the retail specialist's success to date, and so updating their communications network was a natural next step' says Serjios EL-Hage, EMW Regional VP.

'With the opening of more malls and hotels every day in the Emirates, the beauty retail sector is under pressure to remain competitive and offer a top quality experience for its discerning customers. In this environment, Paris Gallery has not only maintained its customer base but continued on a drive for expansion,' commented Nidal Abou Ltaif. 'The implementation of a scaleable IP Telephony solution across this growing chain of regional stores will support both existing and future staff in their internal communications , which has a positive effect on quality of customer service, thereby helping to drive the business overall. The implementation also offers opportunities to integrate the benefits of IP Telephony with back-office software such as their existing ERP solution, delivering like builtin six-way conferencing, extension to cellular (EC500), and MS outlook integration.'

EMW, an Avaya gold-certified partner, implemented the solutions.