Comms Dealer

Never be stumped for a response to the needs of a customer, urges Number Supermarket Director Darren Hughes, who made sure all bases were covered when he established the company in 2014 having secured access to over a million numbers across every different UK range from the outset.

"The aim was to ensure that all clients always had their needs met," he stated. "I've been in telecoms for over 20 years and in that time seen the shift towards more automation, but we insist on making service all-encompassing, personal and around the clock. It's what partners expect."

Number Supermarket has kicked off a reseller recruitment campaign and turned up the volume on what it believes to be key differentiating factors that will catch the attention of potential partners, including its customer-first strategy, white label web portal and management systems, rebate generating numbers and live cloud-based reporting.

Jola has added O2 SIMs to its JolaMobile portfolio, meaning that partners can now order voice and data SIMs for devices from either Vodafone or O2 and control them via a single management portal.

Lee Broxson, Sales Director, commented: "At Griffin we launched 'ISP in a box,' a white label provisioning system for resellers to manage their own Internet connectivity from multiple carriers.

"With Jola we have developed a similar system to manage mobile SIMs. With the increasing demand for 3G and 4G connectivity and 5G in the future, resellers need something to manage burgeoning mobile estates.

"Our white label portal communicates in real-time for adds, moves and changes and can be used by resellers and their end users.

"And the overage protection feature allows resellers to bar SIMs when they reach their data limit to avoid the risk of bill shock from higher, out-of-bundle tariffs."

BNP Paribas rising star Jean-Michel Boyer has taken over the UK operation as CEO following former chief exec Tristan Watkins' appointment to Programme Manager of the BNP Paribas North America Growth Plan, a joint initiative with Bank of the West to expand the Group's equipment finance business in the US and Canada over the next three years.

Boyer will be responsible for providing leadership and management for the 450-strong team and overseeing key customer relationships.

He has worked with the BNP Paribas group for over 30 years, starting in 1986 at UFB Locabail, the equipment leasing arm of Paribas subsidiary Compagnie Bancaire.

Boyer has held several senior managerial, sales, and business development positions within the Agriculture, Technology Solutions, and International Business Lines Equipment & Logistics Solutions (IBL ELS) divisions.

Boyer joined the French division of BNP Paribas Leasing Solution in 2009 as Head of Equipment and Leasing Solutions before becoming General Manager of BNP Paribas Rental Solutions Trucks in 2013. In December 2015, he was appointed Business Development Director of the IBL ELS and President of CLAAS Financial Services SAS.

Boyer said: "There has never been a dull moment in my long career within the BNP Paribas Group, and I'm very much looking forward to the next chapter in this journey.

"Last year, BNP Paribas Leasing Solutions UK advanced in excess of £1.25 billion to over 100,000 British businesses. In my role as CEO, I hope to play a key role in exceeding our ambitious growth targets year-on-year and strengthening our reputation."

Mitel's new 'digital transformation strategy' allows companies to use existing investments, migrate to the cloud at their own pace and access productivity applications 'to compete in the emerging digital business landscape', stated the Canadian vendor.

Mitel said that its strategy also unlocks the power of the Internet of Things (IoT), effectively giving machines a voice with Mitel's call routing technology.

"One of the biggest challenges customers face today is how to keep up with the pace of change, and what they should do first, at a time when digital transformation is recasting traditional business models," said Rich McBee, President and CEO, Mitel.

"Our reference architecture provides a pragmatic, practical roadmap for customers to begin the journey today, no matter the starting point. It also opens the door to the opportunities associated with giving voice to 20 billion IoT devices with more than 450 million voice endpoints."

A new Automated Speech Transcription solution introduced by Liquid Voice helps contact centres and control rooms to more effectively locate and replay stored recordings when used in conjunction with the company's interaction recording and quality monitoring platforms.

Andrew Barrett, Technical Director, said: "The system will also help organisations to comply with the stringent GDPR standards that become mandatory in May 2018."

The solution enables recordings to be searched via any word or phrase and results can be viewed in seconds, eliminating the limitations of traditional phonetic-based systems, said the firm.

Search results can include inbound/outbound calls, emails, SMS and letters sent to customers, and are ranked by relevance and displayed as text summaries with search words automatically highlighted.

Liquid Voice (UK) MD Chris Berry said: "Automated Speech Transcription also makes 100% quality monitoring realistically achievable by enabling organisations to focus on outliers rather than just taking an average view.

"This provides the fullest picture of contact centre performance and revolutionises the way that contact centres can acquire and use speech technologies to improve customer satisfaction at every touchpoint."

The core European co-location hubs of Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam and Paris had a 'strong' start to the year, with 26.6MW of take-up and 38MW of new supply in Q1 2017, according to research from global real estate advisor CBRE.

London was responsible for 17.5MW of take-up, which equates to 60% of the European total. "The market saw significant further activity by the hyper-scale cloud players, which resulted in London's second-largest quarterly total on record," said CBRE. In contrast, Amsterdam (3.5MW), Frankfurt (3.2MW) and Paris (2.3MW) were relatively quiet in the first quarter.

While continued activity from cloud service providers has again been the bed-rock of a strong first quarter, CBRE expects an increase in activity from corporate and enterprise occupiers as the year goes on, which will provide a "more balanced take-up".

Andrew Jay, executive director, data centre solutions at CBRE, said: "We predicted a strong 2017 in the European markets and Q1 has certainly delivered. Given the momentum built up in 2016 we weren't surprised to see a strong start to the year. The key question is whether 2017 will surpass last year's record breaking 155MW. Our view is that we will have another really strong year of at least 100MW, which is astonishing considering that the record take-up prior to 2016 was 78MW."

Q1 came very close to reaching a milestone of 1000MW of supply across the four markets, ending the quarter on 996MW. "We expect a substantial amount of further new supply to come on board during the course of the year, including new entrants in Amsterdam, Frankfurt and London," said Jay.

Highlight has given Daisy Group 'Most Effective Up-sell Campaign' recognition for an initiative that targeted SMB customers with the Highlight product as an add-on to their existing Daisy connectivity service.

Highlight provides real-time alerting and monitoring service on Ethernet connectivity.

With Highlight in place account managers were able to gain visibility of the customers' connectivity usage and launch an up-sell campaign that was specific to the customers' requirements.

Dave McGinn, MD of Daisy SMB, stated: "The analytics that Highlight provides is detailed, and as a result we were able to specifically target customers who were using 80% or more of their bandwidth and offer them the chance to upscale to ensure that their connectivity experience wasn't degraded. These customers are now benefitting from an improved connectivity service."

CityFibre has achieved full ISO certification in all core management systems. The project was supported by certification body NQA and completed in 12 months.

John Franklin, Operations Director at CityFibre, said: "This achievement provides reassurance that we not only comply with recognised accreditations, but that this is built into the core of our business."

Matt Gantley, MD at NQA, added: "Certification in all of these management systems requires strong leadership and a clear commitment to linking strategy with business processes, as well as continuous improvement in quality, safety, environmental performance and risk prevention and control. To achieve this within 12 months shows a clear focus and dedication from CityFibre and its people."

Entanet has expanded its Service Review Programme and appointed Ryan Berrisford to the newly created role of Customer Relationship Manager.

He brings more than ten years experience having worked in first line technical support and latterly the company's premier support team as Team Leader and then Team Manager.

Berrisford said: "I've been heavily involved in our Service Review Programme since its inception and I'm keen to see partners benefit from working closer with us in the future."

TeleWare has enhanced its cloud-based TeleWare Communication Manager (TCM) solution based on customer feedback and investment in the user experience to bring a streamlined login process means customers now only need one single login to access all communications activity.

Other enhancements offer greater supervisor control of agents, training and monitoring, increased in-call information, live outbound call statistics, customisable reporting, while existing reports and analytics can be added to and built upon, without having to create new dashboards for each item.

Daniel Hensby, Head of Product Management, said: "Businesses need the ability to react in real-time to call volumes and critical business situations, making immediate changes to their contact strategy based on real-time or historic data.

"TCM is the first of our products to move over to a centralised control dashboard, or central hub. The hub is a location from which customers will be able to access all their TeleWare services in one portal, as opposed to needing separate logins to access different services. In time, this hub will house all TeleWare services, communication recordings and reporting tools."