Phoney telecoms contracts, don’t be fooled!

Today’s post is aimed at providing useful advice and also venting frustration to a certain degree.

We are a local telecoms service provider and pride ourselves on service quality, great rates and transparency most of all.

I previously wrote a post about not getting stung by contracts and I wanted to revisit this as we’ve dealt with a few competitive issues of late on behalf of some of our customers and I believe most come down to a lack of transparency offered by some telecoms providers.

• Rolling contracts can catch you off guard. When you enter into an agreement, first and foremost you should sign an order/contract to agree to the services, investigate terms and conditions thoroughly and understand exactly what you are getting for your money and how long that contract is for. In some circumstances your supplier may just have rolled on your contract without signature or agreement on the phone (with a recorded WAV file as proof), sometimes into long 3 year or 5 year deals at worst. To add insult to injury, if you didn’t terminate the service within the specified notice period, you can’t do anything but complain to Ofcom. My advice is know when your renewal date is and what notice you need to give
• Penalties are applied by suppliers if you are in contract and you try to switch supplier. You will receive an official letter probably stating that you owe £XXX for terminating your contract early. My advice is always ask for a signed contract or call recording to support the claim. If they cannot provide either then dispute the penalty. You don’t have to pay if you’re not in contract.
  
• Beware of Calling plans I approach this with caution as in very few circumstances do these work. In the majority you are prepaying for calls that you may not even use and unused minutes do not roll over from month to month. Anything over and above is charged at a higher rate, you may incur high connection charges also. My advice, this comes down to transparency again. There is plenty of opportunity for hidden costs and most of these plans are simply marketing ploys to retain or win business. Always look at the small print and the general rule is “if it is too good to be true” it probably isn’t good!
• Slamming is a term known within the industry as taking lines and calls from a customer without consent. This is a shady practice and often wrapped up as a system error! Yeah right!!

I urge my readers to think local, act local and one more bit of advice. If you take away the brand and the big name would you still stick with a supplier if they did the following to you:

• Rolled on your contract even if you didn’t agree to it
• Throw huge penalties at you to force you to stay with them
• Expect you to call into an offshore call centre to handle your enquiries
• Leave you in long call queues to answer your questions
• Take no accountability and are extremely slow to react to faults

I know I wouldn’t, biased or not, it just doesn’t stack up. Thanks for reading.

Emergency Phones and 3G Broadband

-               Have your phone lines gone down within the last 5 years?

-               Have you experienced broadband issues or based rurally?

-               What happens when you can’t use your office phones?

 

Hubb@ 3G Broadband, 3G Broadband, rural broadband, emergency broadband, not spot broadband

The Hubb@ is available in 1, 2 or 4 user bundles

No fixed line required, just plug into the mains supply and you will have phones, email and Wi-Fi 3G broadband access immediately. All you have to do is call us on 0844 209 0875 or email sales@ellesys.com to take advantage of this fantastic product.  Just quote promotional code EL0410. Visit www.ellesys.com to find out more about ellesys.

Avert disaster with the Hubb@

• Uses a 3G mobile network SIM that best suits your geographic area
• Locks onto the fastest data signal, not just the nearest and provides increased data rates
• WiFi has a 50m range and the Hubb@ can lock onto a 3G signal up to15km away
• Upload speed typically five times faster than a dongle
• Used with PDQ machines

Free business line rental, free business phone lines

No cost line rental

For a limited time only to the end of September 2010, we are offering free line rental for up to 5 lines when you sign to ellesys Business lines and calls.

Switch now to avoid price increase from other providers

All you have to do is call us on 0844 209 0875 or email sales@ellesys.com to take advantage of this fantastic offer.  Just quote promotional code EL0709. Visit www.ellesys.com to find out more about ellesys.

Always Great on Rates

• Line rental is only £10.99 per line/month thereafter.
• Less than 1p per minute (0.9p) for local/national calls.
• Only 9p per minute for landline to mobile calls.
• 40% cheaper than BT.
• Billing per second.
• No minimum call charges.
• No set up fees.

Our customers say…

“We moved our telephone calls over to ellesys a few months ago and have definitely made significant savings.” Lola Print

The UKs largest teleco increases prices, is this a sign of the times?

Or just a ploy to off set the price drops for mobile calls and extend their margins?

With other large telcos quickly following suit, you could see your average monthly line rental fee increase by 50 pence and day rate call charges increased by 10%.

You may not feel the pinch too much as a residential customer with many being out of the home during the day but as a business customer with multiple lines, operating at peak throughout the day, this could have a real impact on the bottom line.

The price increases have been quoted as having minimal impact on customers, and have been allegedly as a means to remain competitive during this recession. In my humble opinion penalizing existing customers in order to offer new customers discounts is counter productive.

I am a strong advocate of looking after your customers and ensuring they are on the best price possible. And for that reason, we won’t be passing on any immediate price increases to our clients.

You may be able to avoid these increases if you sign into lengthy contracts and calling plans but that’s not an answer. Go local for great deals, these guys are in the same boat as you and customer service will be first priority.

Check out this article on zdnet for their opinion. http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/networking/2010/07/19/bt-to-raise-prices-for-line-rental-calls-to-landlines-40089569/

Keeping Biz Local

It is now more important than ever that businesses support the local economy. Reducing the countries massive deficits needs more businesses to reinvest.

Where better place to start than with our local businesses whether that means, print, cleaning, utilities, telephones, internet, marketing services, recruitment… just doing business with a local supplier means support on your doorstep when you need it – no outsourced call centres or lengthy cal queues, sound appealing?

ellesys are supporting and exhibiting at the Keeping Biz Local expo at Reading’s Madjeski stadium 7th September. You can register to attend now by visiting http://www.keepingbizlocal.co.uk/reading/index.php

Events are being held throughout Thames Valley, Berkshire, Oxfordshire and Hampshire. It is an ideal place to network, meet new suppliers and of course Keep Biz Local!

Isn’t it about time to review your telephone costs?

Anytime is a good time to review the telephony costs in your business. Remember the more you save, the more impact it has on the bottom line. There are many competitive line rental and call rates to take advantage of, ellesys are leading with one of the lowest published UK local/national call rates of 0.9p per minute with no connection or minimum call charge.

It is all to easy when you are on a calling plan or package including calls to assume that you have free calls. Nothing is free. You are likely to be paying an inflated monthly charge for the plan and the reality is that the call rates aren’t so good.

The way to assess your costs is to look at your cost versus your minutes used (hopefully seconds to get the most accurate billing statistics).

If you really want to make a difference, remember, switching is seamless. Much like gas or electricity, the supply is the same is just provided by a different service provider. We do all the work in the background so that when you switch the only indication is cheaper bills. Visit www.ellesys.com or call 01189070062 to switch.

Petrol prices set for record rises, what does that mean for business? #in

A recent news report http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8569525.stm claims that petrol prices are due to rise to £1.20 per litre, in some areas it’s already hit £1.22 with regional variations.

What does this mean for you as a business and employer. It’s obvious, the knock on effect means that staff commuting costs will increase. You may say that as an employer that is down to your staff  to manage their own finances, true, but what if their mileage is for business purposes? To retain good staff you do need to provide incentives. Expense packages for business commuting is in fairness expected as part of a standard package, certainly for any travelling sales person. Will you need to reconsider your mileage rates more in line with the rising costs in petrol? This issue is also compounded for companies who operate in transport, logistics or haulage. That aside, there are things you can do to reduce the amount of business travel your staff need to do.

Flexible working, work at home, audio conferencing and web collaboration!

This is about implementing a new way of working by empowering your staff, giving them the responsibility to work in their home. It is also about employing widely used technologies to conduct meetings virtually therefore negating the need to meet face to face. Now is the time to act before the prices go up even more.

User adoption can be a barrier to this strategy. So, you need to ensure as an employer you lead by example, promote within your organisation and encourage change.

A truly global education #in

Back into old debating territory I’m afraid, face to face or virtual?

Conferencing and collaboration are widely used for meetings particularly in the corporate sector whether it’s for meetings, training, investor relations, or remote working – there are many applications. Not forgetting, it is also used within the public sector already.

The area I’d like to explore further though is the education sector, and I mean primary and secondary schools and how they can benefit from conferencing to aid learning.

First of all, this is a smart way to integrate schools together not just domestically here in the UK, but across the world. Ideal if you are working on specific projects – perhaps geography, languages, arts or sciences. The benefits are endless regardless of just simply sharing information. This provides a truly multi-cultural, multi-lingual experience for students that may not necessarily have access to in day-to-day learning. Less we forget, this is the internet generation. Kids are used to communicating via social networks, mobiles, texts and the internet.

Secondly, this is also a great way to reach out to remote or home students, to lessen the feelings of isolation and give them access to teaching resources usually unavailable due to their location or circumstances.

Obviously a key consideration for rolling this out infrastructure and security. But if managed right, I think this may be a way of modernising education for the 21st century.

With cuts in mobile termination rates, how are operators going to retrieve lost revenues? #in

Yes it’s good news in a year we will all benefit from cheaper landline to mobile calls which will continue to reduce until 2014-15 when we hit the desired 0.5ppm rate. As a telecoms provider ellesys will guarantee to pass on these cost savings to all our fixed line customers as they happen.

Let’s look at this from a different angle. Whilst landline consumers are benefitting, someone, somewhere is losing out. Specifically, for mobile operators this leaves a large shortfall in revenue, to the tune of about £760 million according to Ofcom. This amount of  loss will not go unnoticed and the black hole left means they have to think quick to make up for the shortfall. Where do they go, but the only viable segment left to claw something back from – mobile phone users.

But what are the operators going to do and what will be the likely impact on these users? My guess is that the operators are likely to levy higher charges in any way they can find to build lost revenue. Maybe fewer minutes on contracts? Other networks not included in bundled minutes? According to an analyst at Collins Stewart, mobile phone users may even see their phone bills rise.

The real effect of this ruling has yet to play out.  Be warned though, where we receive in one hand inevitably something is taken from the other!

How you can apply audio conferencing in your company #in

Regardless of the tangible travel, time and cost saving that audio conferencing and web collaboration provides it is helpful to find out how other organisations are using these services and how these might apply to you. I have taken scenarios from several different company examples spanning different industries:

1. Virtual Office – This is where conferencing really comes into play. Virtual organisations dispersed geographically will benefit greatly from collaborating with conferencing for day-to-day activities or weekly meetings also negating the need to travel.
2. Construction – Ideal for sharing architectural drawings and plans between staff on site and in the office. This improves project management and time to delivery on builds.
3. Large Global Corporate – Global team collaboration for sharing ideas and significant reduction in business travel in time and costs. Also great for large events like investor relations meetings.
4. Education, Training and Coaching – Webinars are a proven method of transferring knowledge. Presentation and document sharing capabilities of web collaboration mean this is an ideal medium to train and educate people in dispersed offices or locations.
5. Recruitment – There are many high costs associated with the recruitment of new staff. Web conferencing may enable you to conduct an initial candidate interviews or for pre-selection to speed up the process and in turn reduce costs.
6. Health – Doctors may find it increasingly useful to attend webinar training sessions so that it maximises the physical time they spend with patients. It may also be useful for patients located in very rural of difficult to reach areas.
7. Public Sector – This is simply a cost reduction exercise making sure public spending goes further by reducing the time that Government staff spend travelling. This is enable you to react quicker in times of public crisis.
8. Legal industry – can assist with the deposition of clients where you or they are unable to meet in person.
9. Oil and Energy – Enable team collaboration over dispersed groups and quicker response time in emergencies.
10. Marketing, advertising, PR – Enable you to communicate with the media effectively, hold press conferences, stream video.
11. IT and Project Management – Assist in the speedier IT roll outs through team collaboration and more effectively managed projects with regular face to face web meetings.

There are so many applications for audio conferencing and web collaboration in any business of any size. I’d be glad to hear how you are using your conferencing services. Just leave a comment.