Yodel

The situation

Yodel delivers millions of parcels every week to every UK postcode. The company operates 50 sites nationwide with 10,000 to 12,000 employees. The work is relentless. Parcels arrive at regional hubs, get sorted by postcode, loaded onto delivery vans, and hit the road. The coordination happens through communication. Depot staff need to reach drivers. Drivers need to reach dispatch. Managers need to communicate across sites.

The existing telephony system was reaching the end of its life. It had served the company well, but the technology was ageing. Parts were getting harder to find. The system was centralised in a way that made it inflexible. If a site needed a new phone line, it took weeks to configure because everything went through a central switch. Yodel needed new telephony infrastructure that could scale with the business and adapt to changing needs.

Ashraf Adil, Director of DevOps and IT Operations, recognised that telephony wasn’t just about making calls. It was about coordination. At peak seasons, Christmas, major shopping events, call volumes spiked dramatically. The system had to handle that spike without melting down.

What SCC did

SCC delivered a RingCentral unified communications platform across all 50 sites. The migration required meticulous planning. Yodel couldn’t have a cutover where all telephony switched at once. If that failed, the entire business stopped. Parcels couldn’t be processed. Drivers couldn’t be coordinated. The failure would cascade through the supply chain.

SCC worked with Yodel to plan a phased migration. Sites were moved in planned batches. Early moves validated the process with lower-risk locations. Critical hub locations were moved later, once the process was proven. The migration team remained available for each cutover to manage any issues that emerged.

The RingCentral platform offered benefits beyond replacing the old system. Calls could be routed across sites more intelligently. If one site was overwhelmed, overflow could be sent elsewhere. Mobile apps meant depot staff could take calls and manage coordination from anywhere on the site. Drivers could be reached through their mobile devices, not only through depot phones.

What changed

Yodel gained agility. New locations could be added to the telephony system without long lead times. Sites could scale phone lines based on seasonal demand without hardware changes. The system could handle peak volumes without melting down, Christmas peaks, Black Friday peaks, all got managed through the cloud-based platform.

The company also gained visibility. Reports showed call patterns, wait times and site-level performance. Yodel could see where training was needed, where peaks were emerging and where processes could be improved. The unified communications platform became a business intelligence tool, not only a phone system.

What the client learned

Ashraf Adil reflected on the execution: “It all ran like clockwork and that’s down to the careful planning and great communication between SCC and Yodel.” Yodel learned that large-scale migrations work when you respect the criticality of what’s being replaced. A telephony outage at a parcel delivery company isn’t a technical problem. It’s a business crisis. SCC approached the work with that understanding and managed the migration accordingly. The learning extended to partnership. By choosing a partner who invested in planning and testing rather than rushing to go live, Yodel minimised risk while gaining a modern platform.