How and when did you create creative- telecoms and what made you go into this industry?
When working for other telecoms providers I found that when talking to customers it seems the telecoms companies were doing what they wanted to do and not what the clients wanted, this became the principal that creative telecoms was founded on.
Creative Telecoms Ltd was created in 2001 with the specific goal of putting the customer first. This was a concept that seemed to get lost in the early days of deregulation. The intention was to build long term relationships with our clients supplying them with the latest technology in a fast changing environment and delivering professionally and at sensible cost. Backing up our offering with excellent customer service was also a priority. I am sure we all recognise the scenario of spending hours waiting on the phone with some suppliers, so at Creative Telecoms we decided on the polar opposite, efficient professional service. Our mission was to provide Start ups, SME's & medium size business the same technical abilities as blue chip corporations.
What changes have you seen in the Telecoms world since you started out?
Enormous - In technology terms over the past 10 years, delivery of service s has been transformed and lead times of service supply have been drastically reduced. In the past it could take weeks for a fairly simple service to be first analyzed by techies and then built and there were also pricing barriers for many SME's, E.G. call recording cost upwards of £3500 and 3 weeks set up time, with onerous rental and cost per minute charges. These days it's a few hundred pounds and a wait of a few hours.
Disaster recovery is another big area again in the past that was cost prohibitive but now it's the cost of a taxi ride per month, and the difference between staying in or going out of business for many companies.
What would a typical client come to creative-telecoms for?
Although we have no typical customers as such, we find that the benefits of our consultative approach to each customer has paid great dividends, not only to Creative Telecoms but our customers as well.
We supply packages for start ups, right thought to blue chip corporates, from builders to travel agents and high street chains, to international press & DRTV advertisers. All of our services are flexible and instantly expandable as your business grows.
How do you see the trend towards mobile communications developing?
From an inbound perspective, mobiles are just about to replace phone lines for start ups and smaller companies whose employees are in different locations. The current costs of transferring calls from the fixed line network to the mobile network is cost prohibitive. However this is about to change with the cost of crossing the networks down to approximately 2 ppm.
Once this new cost comes on-stream, we simply issue a non geographic number, add our intelligent network features and before you know it everyone in the company is connected where ever they are. Whether working from home, on the way to work, on a train, on the way to a meeting, always available to speak with your customers, with the ability to mid call diver to another area of your business, all without phone lines!
How can the correct choice of a company's Telecoms set up aid their sale's process?
In a word "massively". If you're generating large or small volumes of calls from your advertising activity, how
do you know how many calls remain unanswered or how many potential sales calls have you missed. Can you consult your supplier for best practice if they aren't experienced in Inbound telecoms? (if at this point you believe your business never misses a call I'm afraid to tell you that in my experience 95% are). We find that most business and advertisers are losing between 10 & 15% of calls generated, regardless of whether the calls are being answered in house or sent to an outsourced call centre. This is a lot of money and time wasted, and an expensive de-branding exercise. The bottom line is there are many different type of telecoms suppliers available.
What product is currently taking the market by storm?
There are constant innovations in the telecoms industry, however economics will dictate that "taking the market by storm" will represent current and future users having a greater understanding of what's available to them to assist their businesses, ensuring the highest ROI for any advertising or marketing activity undertaken.
We have recently released XML data reporting, a live stream of data sent directly to your media buyer of marketing department which contains all your inbound call information, answered, unanswered, engaged, duration, etc. This is extremely useful for understanding how your call centre and advertising/marketing are performing Add to this our new iphone reporting and routing app, means you should always be in control of your inbound call flow.
In simple product terms, in the market NGN, 0844, 0800, etc, operating with a Virtual Call Centre System to mobile phones is one area where we have seen steady growth. The majority of our customers across widely different industries, are opting for full call recording, for both legal and training purposes.
And one last seemingly simple but extremely effective service: high street chain stores, receive hundreds of inbound queries from customers every day, we began to notice that a good 30% of these call were for information relating to opening hours or location, the simple solution was to give the caller the option to hear this without speaking to an operator; result hundreds of hours of costly call centre time eliminated, and a happy customer who didn't have to wait in a queue to find this information.
How do you see the future for telecoms in general and what part will Creative be playing in it's evolution?
For Creative Telecoms it's about refining the offer to our current & future customer base, by means of staying at the leading edge of telecoms supply, making sure that the businesses that work with Creative Telecoms are returning the best possible ROI on advertising/marketing and putting in the building blocks which make their telecoms an extremely resilient part of their daily business. One which can be measured and quantified and completely understood, gain our customers maximum benefit.
In 2007 we moved into the western European market, handling DRTV (Direct Response TV) across a number of different countries and bringing all the relevant information to one simple to understand point. In 2012 ,we are set to take a greater foothold in this market but are also to beginning to move into eastern Europe.
For more information go to www.creative-telecoms.co.uk [1]
Steve Forkin, MD at Creative Telecoms