Institute of Chartered Accountants (ICAEW)
The Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW) is a world-leading professional membership organisation that promotes, develops and supports more than 148,000 members across 154 countries.
ICAEW needed a video conferencing solution as part of their latest audio visual refresh and decided to choose Lifesize.
Martin Amos, IT/AV Infrastructure Manager at the ICAEW, shares how Lifesize helps their organisation take the lead in the business and finance sector.
Martin Amos
IT/AV Infrastructure Manager at ICAEW
“Lifesize plays a critical role in building the profile of our work globally and in our ability to influence and support our members. By investing in cutting edge cloud-based technology, we are able to offer solutions to our members, partners and subcommittees.
We can cater to all their needs — recording calls, dialling in from tablets, sharing content, local dial-in numbers and a host of other functionalities — without having to host any of it in our own data centre.”
Why Lifesize?
We have been using Lifesize solutions for more than six months for internal and external purposes and have deployed Lifesize HD camera and phone systems in our meeting rooms as part of our subscription to the cloud-based Lifesize platform. The collaboration technology is widely used by more than 700 employees in nine different office locations, from London and Milton Keynes to Dubai. The ICAEW office in London is home to the Auditorium, at One Moorgate Place, a venue that is booked daily for business events. Since deploying Lifesize, we have been able to offer remote attendees, such as regional bodies, the opportunity to attend events via video.
Staff Onboarding
The IT team provided a step-by-step process about how to use the system on our intranet site. We also targeted super-users, those we knew who would use the solution a great deal, in each department to champion the solution and help train their team members. We are able to monitor usability and essentially troubleshoot any problems in real time using the Lifesize Admin Console, therefore ensuring a seamless experience for all users.
Lifesize has been very well accepted by staff. Our staff members found the collaboration software and hardware reliable and easy to use. First-time users have been able to use the solution with minimal fuss, eliminating any hesitation when needing to use the system again.
Business Impact
Simply put, video provides a much better and more personal experience than audio alone. Video enables us to know someone by sight, not just by sound, and immediately improves the quality and productivity of our meetings. Our internal communication process has been a journey of continuous evolution and improvement, one in which I have great faith. All it takes is one bad experience for someone to decide they won’t use video conferencing again, but everyone who has used Lifesize has been
impressed, so usage will continue to grow.
We have already seen a significant reduction in travel costs, as well as environmental savings. The way we see it, Lifesize plays a critical role in the build-out of our global work profile and in our ability to influence and support our members. By investing in cutting-edge, cloud-based technology, we are able to offer solutions to our members, partners and subcommittees. We can cater to all their needs — recording calls, dialling in from tablets, sharing content, local dial-in numbers and a host of other functionalities — without having to host any of it in our own data centre.
Future Focus
One of our key focuses will be integration with existing solutions used by the ICAEW, in particular Skype for Business. The relationship between Lifesize and Skype for Business is
mutual, making communication and collaboration truly smooth and seamless.
We are also keen to start using Lifesize Live Stream to bring together all staff members across the world for live quarterly meetings. Not only can you broadcast to up to 10,000 viewers, you can also enable 50 video sites per call across a variety of browsers, which is perfect for large audiences and company-wide meetings. I want to grow usage externally for distance learning, member services and events. Internal usage has been such a success, so I would like to replicate this externally.
Martin Amos
IT/AV Infrastructure Manager at ICAEW
“Since the refurbishment, revenue associated with bookings in the Great Hall has increased by 27% and the number of bookings has increased by 16%, this is largely a result of the vast improvement of the AV facilities in the space.
The AV offers the space a really unique selling point, many of our competitors are unable to compare their in-house facilities with our own.
We find that clients are more likely to book with us due to our equipment, it often saves them thousands of pounds, where they would usually bring in their own AV through an external company.
Furthermore the quality of the AV has helped us gain greater revenue as we have been able to increase the rack rates of the space.”