Did you know we now do phone systems?
Cloud telephony system
As we approach the new year, we have decided to bite the bullet and expand our technology portfolio to include directly selling telephone systems so that we can sell reliable, low-cost telephony solutions to our customers instead of reselling someone else's offering, and because of this, we won’t tie you into excessively long contract terms, unlike other companies that are contractually bound to resell services at the suppliers terms.
We have put together a flexible platform using one of the industry leading cloud PBX (phone system) solutions, coupled with programmable handsets, both wired and wireless, and soft phones that can installed on computers and mobiles and be used anywhere, allowing businesses to have flexible communications both in and away from the office.
Why have we decided to do this?
The primary reason we have decided to provide our clients with telephony solutions is to cut out the 3rd party suppliers that can cause delay and issue because we were stuck in the middle, brokering support issues on behalf of our clients.
By bringing it in house, we can support the solution directly, without having to broker support to a 3rd party supplier, we support and maintain the phone system directly for our clients, meaning we can make changes and updates for our clients without having to wait on others. We manage it directly.
Would we use it ourselves?
Yes, absolutely, in fact we already do. We wanted to change our phone system, our old system, although good, was far too complicated, difficult to use and whilst it could do what we needed, it was very easy to break if we got any of the settings even slightly wrong.
What is more, we were relying on a supplier to support it, we were at the mercy of their internal service level agreements, so if we had a problem, we would go into a queue and have to wait for it to be resolved.
We don't like that. which is why we decided to find a solution we could support ourselves, one that had comprehensive functionality without it being so complicated that we would need to send people on weeks of training just to master the basics.
So we found a solution, one that is so good, and so comprehensive that we adopted it for ourselves and use it as our business phone system.
And because we love the functionality so much and that we can comprehensively support it, we decided it was time to share it with you, our clients, to benefit from the same flexible, work anywhere phone system that we use.
How does it work?
I will try to put this in easy to understand terms. For years telephony remained the same, it is only until recently that it has changed how it works. Here is the boring potted history lesson, you can skip it if you want to but here goes...
In the past, telephony was pretty basic, for decades we used to rely on PSTN (public switched telephone networks), it was typically 1 phone number on one copper wire if you were a house. If you wanted a second line they would string a second bit of wire. For businesses they could use ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network) lines, with two types on offer. Either ISDN-2 or ISDN-30 lines.
An ISDN-2 line could support 2 numbers and an ISDN-30 line could support up to 30 numbers.
If you needed 5 numbers, you could get 3 x ISDN-2 lines into your office and connect them to your office PBX (private branch exchange) phone system.
If you needed 100 lines, you would get 4 x ISDN-30 lines (you could have 3 x ISDN-30 + 5 x ISDN-2 to get to 100 but this would be constrained, typically you would have 4 x ISDN-30 to provide you with capacity for growth to flex up to 120 lines if needed).
The PBX is the office switch board that allows you to transfer calls and make calls internally. You can make as many internal (extension to extension) calls as you wanted concurrently, but inbound and outbound numbers are limited to the number of lines you had going into your PBX. A company could have 100 staff but only 5 inbound / outbound lines so only 5 concurrent phone calls could me made either to or from the company at any one time.
Fast forward to modern times, as telephony and VoIP (voice over internet protocol) was introduced. This allowed voice calls to be made over a computer network and made it easier to have more flexible phone solutions because of the internet protocol part of the VoIP name. It meant you could use computer networks to connect your handset to the back end phone system.
In conjunction with VoIP we also have SIP (session initiated protocol). SIP is the protocol that is used to initiate, modify, and terminate communication sessions. It is the layer that allows you to establish a telephone network, it is where you assign phone numbers and concurrent lines to a system and VoIP is your voice sitting on top of it when you make a call. It is a bit like the old fashioned physical cable that used to run from the exchange to your handset, but it builds this connection virtually, over the top of the computer network, removing the need for physical connections.
With the combination of VoIP, SIP and cloud based phone systems, it is now possible to have a phone solution for your business that gives you all the advantages of your own internal phone switch without needing a physical bit of hardware to run your phones, or physical wires from the exchange to your office.
It lets you work anywhere, so long as your have an internet connection because it uses the internet to establish the connection between the cloud PBX and the handsets.
Our cloud PBX solution
Our solution leverages this, we use SIP trunks for hosting the numbers used in the business and we add one SIP channel to the trunk for each concurrent call that the business requires. Think of it like this, one SIP channel = 1 phone line that can be used for inbound and outbound calls.
If you business needs the ability to make or receive 4 concurrent calls, it would need 4 SIP channels.
Every SIP channel we add to a phone solution includes a bundle of 2000 minutes each month that can be used for calling UK geographic numbers and UK mobile numbers.
You only need SIP channels for the number of concurrent calls you make, not the number of staff you have using the solution.
Four concurrent lines would require four SIP channels, each having a call bundle so the business would get a shared pool of 8000 inclusive minutes to use that month by all of the users in the business. The pool of minutes are shared across all extensions, rather than it being 2000 per channel, so if one person is making a LOT of calls, they could use the lions share of the pool without incurring additional costs.
Our packages are very competitive as well, in fact we are confident we can beat your existing supplier and we aren't like other telephony providers that try to lock you into seven year contracts.
We are different, our telephony contracts start at 12 month duration with the option of a 24 month contract with a call bundle discount. We can do longer contracts with bigger savings, we just won't force you to!
Our phone solution supports multiple inbound numbers, direct dial and geographic and non-geographic numbers, as well as freephone and premium rate lines.
Our phone solution allows you to have:
- Desk phones - physical telephone handset extensions on the desk
- Wireless phones - physical portable wireless telephone that connects to the phone system over WiFi
- Soft phones - software application on your mobile or computer that is a virtual phone extension of the phone system
- Call recording
- System attendant (press 1 for sales, press 2 for accounts etc...)
- Voicemail with voicemail to email option
- Conference calling
- Geographic and non-geographic numbers
- Freephone and premium rate numbers
- Call routing and hunt groups
- Reporting and analytics
- Security and compliance
- Microsoft 365 integration
- Plus many more enterprise features, whatever your phone system can do, we are confident ours can as well
If you would like more information or you would like to see it in action, call us on 01722 411 999 and we can show you how it works, how easy it is to use and provide you with a quote to see if we can beat your current phone system contract.
We love our phone solution, it is feature rich, yet simple to use, and we are sure you and your staff will love it also.