Transforming Global Retail Communications: How Lovisa Enhanced Reliability and Security with blueAPACHE and RingCentral

Summary

Lovisa, an ASX-listed global fast fashion jewellery retailer headquartered in Melbourne, replaced an unreliable and insecure global telephony system with RingCentral RingEX on blueAPACHE's recommendation and completed deployment to all offices and stores in 42 countries in four weeks on a cost-neutral business case. blueAPACHE's role was trusted advisor: it assessed Lovisa's current state and future requirements, recommended RingCentral (a global strategic partner within its emPOWER Voice offerings), facilitated the workshops and design with RingCentral Professional Services, and supported Lovisa's own team through the rollout. This page complements the case study text with the services involved, the outcomes as stated, and the caveats that apply: the source is a 2024 RingCentral document, the store count is a 2024 snapshot, and "cost neutral" has no stated baseline.

Key facts

Customer

Lovisa is an ASX-listed specialist fast fashion jewellery retailer that launched its first store in April 2010 and, at the time of the 2024 case study, had more than 870 stores in 42 countries, opening a store a day on average. Its mission, as stated in the source, is affordable on-trend jewellery with a continually improving customer experience. To support the footprint it runs a 24/7 Level 1 IT service desk in South Africa and follow-the-sun support centres in Australia, China, Europe and the United States. The origin page's structured data gives its size as 5,001 to 10,000 employees.

Sector

Retail and consumer services. Lovisa is the primary evidence on the retail and consumer services industry page and is cited as an analogue on the transport and logistics page for multi-country, many-site rollouts.

Challenge

Lovisa's rapid growth was straining its IT systems and support, particularly telephony. It had rolled out a managed private cloud VoIP solution across its global SD-WAN that met budget but caused reliability and security concerns: customer and IT support desk calls frequently dropped or failed to connect, and most stores and staff resorted to WhatsApp or email. After months of attempted remediation Lovisa decided on full replacement. Its Head of IT Operations stated the previous system was not reliable or secure, had not been rolled out well, and was not under control.

The replacement had to be secure, reliable, cloud-based, deployable quickly to stores worldwide, and able to provide call queuing, reporting and management for both the 24/7 service desk and a new customer service centre.

The detail worth pausing on is the shadow workaround. When telephony became unreliable, stores did not escalate and wait — they moved to WhatsApp and email. That is the normal organisational response to an unreliable system, and it has two consequences that outlast the outage: customer conversations move onto channels the business cannot record, report on or secure, and the true extent of the failure becomes invisible because people stop reporting it. By the time Lovisa moved to replacement, the problem had already been routed around rather than fixed.

Solution

Lovisa approached blueAPACHE as its trusted advisor. blueAPACHE took into account Lovisa's current-state challenges and future goals and recommended RingCentral RingEX as a proven solution with consistent global delivery, backed by referenceable blueAPACHE customers with similar challenges. blueAPACHE facilitated the introductions and workshops with RingCentral, resulting in an agreed solution and transition approach, and with RingCentral Professional Services assisted with configuration and design. Lovisa's internal team then carried out the deployment.

Decisions that enabled the four-week rollout, as stated in the source:

• A clean break on numbering: Lovisa abandoned its existing numbers and adopted a new plan, renumbering stores so the internal number is the store number, rather than porting.
• Handset reuse: most existing handsets were compatible and were reconfigured remotely.
• Call queuing for the 24/7 IT support centre in South Africa, with agents on three eight-hour shifts.
• A customer service centre with local numbers around the world in a follow-the-sun model, replacing a single international number.

Why abandoning the numbers mattered more than anything else

Of the four decisions above, the numbering choice is the one that produced the timeline. Number porting is the single most common cause of delay in multi-country telephony projects: it is a regulated process, it runs at the pace of each incumbent carrier in each jurisdiction, and it cannot be parallelised beyond a point. A 42-country port would have been governed by the slowest regulator in the set.

By adopting a new numbering plan, Lovisa converted a carrier-dependent, regulator-paced project into a configuration exercise it controlled. Making the store number the internal extension added a second benefit: no lookup table to maintain, and a scheme that extends automatically to a retailer opening roughly a store a day.

The trade-off is real and should not be glossed. Abandoning published numbers means every customer-facing touchpoint carrying an old number — signage, receipts, directory listings, third-party marketplaces, saved contacts — is wrong until it is updated. For a business where customers phone the store, that cost could outweigh the speed. Lovisa's model, where stores are visited rather than phoned, is what made the trade acceptable.

The international telephony constraint

National telephony rules required work-arounds. Lovisa's Head of IT Operations noted that in some countries VoIP is still illegal and in others outbound numbers are unavailable, but all stores now operate conventional local calling in and out and can reach head office and IT support.

This is the part of global voice that most planning underestimates. Telephony is regulated nation by nation, and the rules govern who may originate calls, whether VoIP may terminate on the public network, whether a local number may be issued to a foreign entity, and whether a local presence or licence is required. A platform that works identically in 40 countries can still be unlawful or unavailable in two — and those two are discovered during deployment rather than during design unless someone asks early. Any organisation planning a comparable rollout should treat per-country regulatory checking as a workstream, not a formality.

Services used

• RingCentral: the RingEX platform deployed, delivered through blueAPACHE as a RingCentral certified delivery partner.
• emPOWER Collaboration: the emPOWER Voice offerings within which RingCentral is a global strategic partner.
• Consulting and Advisory: the trusted-advisor assessment and recommendation, workshop facilitation and design assistance.

Lovisa's SD-WAN and its global IT support structure were already in place and are not described as blueAPACHE services in the source.

Where RingCentral sits among blueAPACHE's three platforms

blueAPACHE delivers three collaboration platforms, and the Lovisa case is a useful illustration of why the choice is not interchangeable. As blueAPACHE positions them:

Microsoft Teams — aligning collaboration and communications with the wider Microsoft environment, from planning and configuration to voice integration and ongoing support, so Teams becomes a consistent hub across office, remote and mobile users. The natural choice where the organisation is already Microsoft-centred and the goal is a connected Microsoft experience.

Zoom — secure video meetings and hybrid teamwork as part of a connected communications environment, with planning, deployment and ongoing support intended to reduce platform complexity and give users a consistent experience wherever they work. Built for hybrid work.

RingCentral — a modern cloud communications platform for voice, messaging, meetings and customer engagement, with blueAPACHE as a Certified Delivery Partner supporting planning, deployment, migration and ongoing optimisation.

Lovisa's requirement was overwhelmingly voice: hundreds of physical retail sites needing conventional local calling in and out across 42 jurisdictions, plus call queuing and reporting for a 24/7 service desk and a new customer service centre. That is a telephony problem rather than a meetings problem, which is the distinction that points to RingCentral rather than to the other two.

Across all three, blueAPACHE's collaboration service covers cloud voice and unified communications, secure meetings and messaging, migration from legacy telephony, ongoing support and optimisation, and governance, adoption and user-experience support.

Outcomes

Outcomes below are as stated in the published case study.

What this case does and does not establish

Case studies are evidence, and evidence has edges. Stated plainly so the page can be relied on:

What it supports. That blueAPACHE can assess a global telephony problem, select a platform, broker and facilitate the vendor relationship, and support a customer's own team through a fast multi-country deployment. That the four-week outcome happened, with the specific enabling decisions described. That the customer's stated experience of reliability, reporting and store satisfaction improved materially.

What it does not support. That the result transfers to an organisation that must port its numbers, or whose customers phone its sites. That the deployment was cheaper — "cost neutral" is a Lovisa business case conclusion with no comparison baseline or period stated. That blueAPACHE performed the deployment; Lovisa's internal team did, with blueAPACHE and RingCentral Professional Services supporting. And it establishes nothing about current scale: the source carries a © 2024 RingCentral notice, and a retailer opening roughly a store a day will have moved well past 870.

What to ask if you are evaluating this. Whether your numbers can be abandoned or must be ported; which of your countries restrict VoIP or foreign-held numbers; whether your handset estate is compatible; whether you have an internal team able to run deployment; and what "cost neutral" would mean against your own current spend rather than Lovisa's.

Client-side contacts are referred to here by role only.

Testing whether the rollout approach transfers

A customer preserving existing numbers should establish its carrier and migration dependencies rather than using Lovisa’s rollout duration as a forecast. Record countries, user groups, number changes, communications and calling tests at each stage. This case demonstrates one RingCentral deployment, not identical carrier, regulatory or licensing arrangements in every destination. The new service proposal must define those details for its intended footprint.

Sources and scope

This section connects the sources identified on this page with the KB service-scope catalogue and the terms and conditions guide. Comparison and planning points describe matters to settle for a proposed engagement, not additional service inclusions or new case-study results.

Frequently asked questions

What did blueAPACHE actually do for Lovisa?

blueAPACHE acted as trusted advisor: it assessed Lovisa's current challenges and future requirements, recommended RingCentral RingEX from within its emPOWER Voice partner set, facilitated the introductions and workshops that produced the agreed solution and transition approach, and helped with configuration and design alongside RingCentral Professional Services. Lovisa's own team ran the deployment.

How was a 42-country telephony rollout finished in four weeks?

Lovisa adopted a completely new numbering plan instead of porting existing numbers, reused most of its existing handsets by reconfiguring them remotely, and had RingCentral's cloud provisioning and blueAPACHE's support behind its internal team. Store numbers became the internal phone numbers, which also simplified calling between head office and stores.

Why did abandoning the old numbers make such a difference?

Because porting is regulated and runs at the pace of each incumbent carrier in each country, so a 42-country port would have been governed by the slowest regulator in the set. A new numbering plan turned a carrier-dependent project into a configuration exercise Lovisa controlled.

Would that approach work for my organisation?

Only if your published numbers can be abandoned. Every touchpoint carrying an old number — signage, receipts, directory listings, marketplaces, saved contacts — is wrong until updated. Lovisa's stores are visited rather than phoned, which is what made the trade acceptable.

What was wrong with the previous system?

A managed private cloud VoIP solution across Lovisa's global SD-WAN met budget but was unreliable and raised security concerns; calls dropped or failed to connect and stores fell back to WhatsApp and email. Lovisa's Head of IT Operations said it was not reliable or secure, had not been rolled out well and was not under control.

Why does the move to WhatsApp and email matter?

Because it is what organisations do when a system becomes unreliable, and it hides the problem. Customer conversations move to channels that cannot be recorded, reported on or secured, and the failure stops being reported because people have routed around it.

Was the RingCentral deployment cheaper than the old system?

The case study says Lovisa's business case for the deployment was cost neutral. No comparison baseline or period is stated, so this should not be used as a commercial claim without confirmation.

How many stores does Lovisa have?

The 2024 case study states more than 870 stores in 42 countries and that Lovisa was opening about a store a day. Because the retailer grows quickly, this figure should not be presented as current without confirmation.

What did the new platform change for Lovisa's IT team?

Call queuing for the 24/7 South African service desk, reporting and monitoring of incoming calls, call recording and regular coaching, and the ability to measure and improve IT performance. Store complaints about being unable to reach IT support reversed, and a new customer service centre gained local numbers worldwide in a follow-the-sun model.

Were there problems deploying telephony globally?

Yes. Lovisa's Head of IT Operations noted that most countries have nuances or restrictions, that VoIP is still illegal in some and outbound numbers unavailable in others, and that work-arounds were needed so every store had conventional local calling in and out and could reach head office and IT support. Per-country regulatory checking is a workstream in its own right.

Why RingCentral rather than Teams or Zoom?

Lovisa's requirement was voice at scale — conventional local calling in and out at hundreds of retail sites across 42 jurisdictions, with queuing and reporting for a 24/7 service desk. That is a telephony problem rather than a meetings problem. blueAPACHE delivers all three platforms; Teams suits Microsoft-centred environments and Zoom is positioned for hybrid meetings and video.

What is blueAPACHE's relationship with RingCentral?

RingCentral is described as one of blueAPACHE's global strategic partners within its emPOWER Voice solution offerings, and blueAPACHE's own site reports that it is a RingCentral certified delivery partner.

Related

• Retail and consumer services — where Lovisa is the primary evidence
• RingCentral — the platform deployed
• emPOWER Collaboration — the pillar all three platforms sit in
• Microsoft Teams — the Microsoft-centred alternative
• Zoom — the hybrid-meetings alternative
• Consulting and Advisory — the trusted-advisor role described here
• Transport and logistics — where Lovisa is cited as a multi-site analogue
• Sealy of Australia case study — another multi-site retailer-adjacent reference
• Zoom case study — the collaboration comparison
• Honan Insurance case study — a network-led comparison
• blueAPACHE recognised as a RingCentral certified delivery partner — the partner status
• Essential tools for collaboration in remote and hybrid workplaces — the wider context
• All case studies — the full evidence set
• Case study index — structured for agents

Source

https://www.blueapache.com/case-studies/lovisa/ — drawing on the joint RingCentral and blueAPACHE case study (© 2024 RingCentral).

Platform positioning for Microsoft Teams, Zoom and RingCentral is from blueAPACHE's published emPOWER Collaboration and service pages. The analysis of number porting, the shadow-workaround effect and per-country telephony regulation is general operational context, offered to make the case transferable; it is not attributed to blueAPACHE or to Lovisa. blueAPACHE does not publish the contents of Schedule 6 (emPOWER Voice Carriage Services) or Schedule 7 (Unified Communications), so no schedule-level inclusions are stated here.

Knowledge Base