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Old Knebworth number able to ring on SIP trunks (VOIP Lines )in Stevenage Office (had previously cost £1000s in line rental and divert charges over a period of many years)
New ‘Out of hours’ service launched at weekends using IP phone at home location ie a worker at home can answer calls as if in the office.
Directors able to work from home as if in the office
SAved £1000s on line rentals and leasing charges
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Smartinfo Ltd, a City of London based leading supplier of Alcatel, Mitel and Samsung telephone
systems along with electronic surveillance and mobile phone solutions are the preferred provider for
the Wandsworth based Networking Group to supply the telephone system requirements of
Wandsworth SME community.
As The Wandsworth Telephone Exchange is now enabled for FTTC (Fibre to the Cabinet)
the Networking Group are putting their contacts in touch with Tim Orchard – Smartinfo’s local
representative.
FTTC brings blisteringly fast broadband to businesses at a fraction of the price they would have paid
previously for a similar service. In turn this makes VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol – Internet
Telephony) a cost effective alternative to expensive ISDN (Digital) phone lines.
For more information contact: [email protected]
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Smartinfo have been supplying many companies in the media industry with phone systems and services for many years now, Day-Gardener DGP, China Blue, Pink Pigeon, Adventure Pictures (Sally Potter), Ealing and Hds Studios to name but a few.
The Media industry, especially in Soho, London moves around alot, Due to productions scaling up with rapid staff upscalling and scaling back once product finishes.
One such company Caveman Films run by production supremo Jonathan Cavendish (Bridget Jones, Gangster No 1). Due to overlapping productions staff numbers fluctuated over a 3 year period, this meant new bigger offices had to be moved into to accommodate temporary and intern staff.
Three office moves were required, Smartinfo moved Caveman over to SIP trunks – this meant the phone system could be moved to any location and their main numbers moved instantly too, the system can even be placed in a house in-between moves temporarily.
Mr Cavendish has now started a new venture with Andy Serkis (Lord of the Rings) – Imaginarium films, and the same phone system, and SIP Trunks can accommodate the new company and brand as a standalone separate entity.
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For owners of Samsung, Mitel and Alcatel Phone systems; we can integrate them to you network and desktop PCs, giving you popping of your Outlook contacts on an incoming call, or dialling out straight from an Outlook contact record.
Many of the CTI (Computer Telephony Integration) can also dial out simply by highlighting a phone number on a webpage of PDF document, from the initial call adding to the address book is as simple as ‘add new contact’
Samsung Xchange, Mitel Communicator (previously YA, or Your Assistant) and Alcatel Pimphony (personal information manager) have also moved into the realms of “Presence” put simply your phone or mini-message-window can be set depending on your activity, such as in a meeting, on a call, out of the office, Some can even look up your calendar to set your phone/cti ‘presence’
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Smartinfo Ltd, a City of London based leading supplier ofAlcatel, Mitel and Samsung telephone systems along with electronic surveillance and mobile phone solutions are announce that their suppliers have informed them that they will soon be releasing voice recognition application for incoming calls.
What the product is designed to do is to identify the incoming caller and their name will pop up on the screen. Smartinfo are very excited about the benefits of that this product will confer on the users and see it making Dental and Doctors Practices call handling much easier. The release date has not been given.
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Music on hold for business telephone systems provides a great marketing tool as well as enhancing the marketing image of your business to both customers and suppliers.
A music on hold player is an easy and cost effective addition to any phone system. Most music on hold players nowadays are MP3 players – so have no moving parts ensuring a long life.
As the new MOH players are MP3, most come with a memory card to load music or messages on, simply pop the card into your PC and use the bundled software to create and upload your audio file.
MOH is now more commonly know as Messaging on hold, as companies use Holding as a free marketing slot. Some examples of pertinent marketing messages:-
1) Details of Special Offers
2) To cross sell other product ranges
3) To launch new product ranges, or announce new office or store openings
4) to make company informercials, such as web address or direction details
Many of the MOH systems we supply include loyalty free music and some have professional recordings included. Smartinfo also have partnerships with studios and actors to record a professional message, and overdubbed on your choice of music type from classical to retro to pop or rock.
Customers who added MOH to systems have always been ecstatic with the results and ‘band for buck’ image it purveys.
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Smartinfo have provided telephone systems and phone system upgrades to financial institutions in the City of London for the past 7 years. One of the Vendors we work closely with are Mitel, based next door to us on Bishopsgate, near Liverpool street.
Mitel have a suite of telephone applications such as CTI, Mobile extension and Turret replication with line key for open channels, giving a more compact and effective turret. Line keys can be set up to stay-open or stay-alive in trading environments. CTI can be introduced to hot- conference in colleagues or external trading parties, with the click of a mouse and keyboard.
Smartinfo have supplied banks, brokerages, clearing and exchanges, trading screen and software providers throughout the City and Canary Wharf.
Please give us a call to arrange an appointment at the Mitel Demonstration suite to see a live demo of what can be done for you city based business.
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Last nights “Richard Wilson On Hold” program on automated systems.
We have written before on automated systems, our view is a very straight forward one. If they are simple (as is the case with Auto attendants) they can work very well.
We do not however advocate their use to replace every possible human activity. We would suggest in an office with say 100-200 staff a system whereby you “say the persons name you want to talk to” can work well. IVR or interactive voice response work on algorithms of speech recognition – and are improving all the time.
The example of cinemas is the other extreme, where the voice algorithms are more complex (nationwide accents, odd film titles), and are not effective, where a more old fashioned auto attendant, press 1 for Tintin or 2 for Silent Movie would be more effective – We have used this for theatre bookings systems which is very effective as calls can be processed 24-7 when the box office is not even manned. Some times the use of technology can be over engineered, for technologies sake.
We are no expert on Automatic tills (!) but as we are based in the City next to Liverpool Street, the very busy Tesco and Boots always had very long 20 minute queues before the rows of automated tills were installed, if people want to buy alcohol and weighed items they should join the queue for the manned tills – there is still a choice.
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Last nights “Richard Wilson On Hold”
Though we would just comment as an industry insider on automated telephone systems.
The program covered two distinct areas of the phone system industry,
1) Being put on hold before you get to speak to an operator. In phone system terms call centre software is called ACD – or automatic call distribution. This enables a larger number of calls to be handled by a fewer number of people, so put basically if you have 100 calls coming into a call centre at a particular time, with ACD software you can que 75 of the calls when the 25 operators deal with enquiries.
As a phone system solution provider we provide the tools to enable a business to achieve this, what tends to happen is these tools are ‘abused’ or cranked up to unfair wait times on clients, typically when a new manager in a call centre is brought in, or a new operations manager has to cut costs, usually by cutting staff. In real terms the 25 could be cut to 20, then 15 then 10 people over time and rounds of cuts.
We recommend hold times of less than 2 minutes. If consumers could see it form the other side, if you are a call center of 25 operatives that gets 5,000 calls a day (circa 625 an hour, 25 calls each op per hour), but many call centres dealing with consumers get many more calls between 12:30 and 2pm – when most consumers are free to make personal calls at lunch – so 25 operative may need to handle 1500-2000 calls in the lunch hour – and this is how ACD software should be used to smooth the curve, as most would concede its hard to find people who only want to work for an hour at lunchtime, let alone the space needed to seat them!
A more cynical point was the use of 0870 and 0871 numbers where the operators purposely hold customers (certain football clubs will not be mentioned), as the called company ears revenue on the call. Thankfully this has been tackled by the regulator, reducing the cost of the calls to these numbers. These practices still however prevail and we hope to see regulation stamp them out further.
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Smartinfo have an estate agent customer in Islington, London.
The estate agent was started by two partners and had grown to 2 offices, the main in Islington and the second in Hampstead.
Their traditional incumbent provider had failed to keep abreast with the latest developments in telecoms technology, both in relation to telcom services and phone system features that can enable their business model.
Initially we consolidated their ISDN and analogue lines, and converted them into SIP trunks – this enabled more efficient line usage, ie they could cut down from 8 lines to 4 Sip trunks (Sip trunks can also be increased and decreased instantly at busy times, on a monthly basis).
All new Sip trunks are now delivered into the main Islington office. Calls to Hampstead are delivered into Islington lines, but ring in Hampstead on IP (Voip) phone extensions, unless unanswered in which case it can overflow identified to Islington N1 HQ.
As the market over the last couple of years has fluctuated the partners have used the phone system to react, where bigger players could not and as a consequence folded. The Hampstead branch office was closed as a physical office, but calls were not taken by its staff in Islington, with no noticeable change to the public clients.
As an entrepreneurial pair, one decided to emigrate to South Africa, to replicate the same business model there. He took an IP phone and was able to continue his administrative role (Accounts and legals) as if still in the UK. (With the use of some cloud based access to London PCs).
As he embraced his new SA lifestyle he also had a requirement for his SA mobile to be attached to the sytem, to take calls at un synchronised hours and on the school run – this was achieved with Mobex so he had full call control, so the ability to transfer the call from his SA mobile back to a London Extension seamlessly.