Automated communications specialist, ANT Telecom, has been selected by Distinctly, an award winning search marketing agency, to deploy a cloud based telephony service and upgrade its broadband for increased reliability, speed and connectivity.
ANT Telecom was chosen to improve and maintain the agency’s communications at Distinctly’s head office based in Rickmansworth, Hertfordshire. With a team of 15 staff, the company works with multiple clients on SEO, PPC and content marketing campaigns and as such required a dependable telephony solution and fast broadband to provide an optimum service level to its clients.
Previously, the agency was experiencing multiple problems with its existing provider, including an intermittent internet connection and phone calls regularly cutting out after 16 minutes. Even more frustratingly, the provider was unwilling to offer a solution to these issues, instead they shunned all responsibility, claiming the problems were with Distinctly’s network. Furthermore, they were slow to respond and didn’t keep the agency informed of the progress of any faults reported. This caused a multitude of issues for the business – interrupting the agency’s day to day services which rely on a broadband and telephone connection – and also resulted in a significant number of hours wasted trying to resolve the problems themselves, without any expertise from the provider.
After nine months of connection difficulties, Distinctly sought the help of ANT Telecom to find a working and reliable solution to meet its needs. With plans to expand the Rickmansworth and London offices as well as recruiting staff to work in remote locations such as Birmingham, it was crucial that the solution was scalable to suit the growing organisation.
Tom Shurville, MD at Distinctly comments: “We were struggling with phone calls dropping out and unreliable internet connectivity for a significant amount of time, so urgently required a solution that we could reply upon. Not only that, but without the technical support that one expects from a service provider, we previously felt like we were on our own in trying to find a resolution. It was therefore crucial that we not only found a company that could deploy a reliable solution, but also provide excellent customer service and support moving forwards, which we have found with the team at ANT Telecom.”
Distinctly now benefits from a cloud-based telephony solution run on a highly resilient network, featuring expansion capabilities on a user by user basis, advanced hunt groups, mobile twinning and 5,000 minutes of inclusive calls per user. Furthermore, setting up users in remote offices or from home is easy to deploy, supporting Distinctly’s expansion plans.
As well as reliable connectivity, the main consideration for Distinctly was to work with a provider that could deliver an excellent level of customer service and understand the needs of the business so that if an issue occurs, it can be dealt with swiftly. Since ANT Telecom deployed the solution, there had been one incident that was causing the internet connection to drop out, but ANT Telecom quickly diagnosed that the problem was not stemming from their services and liaised directly with Distinctly’s IT provider. By going the extra mile in working with the IT provider, ANT was able to reassure Distinctly that the issue was contained solely within the network and that the IT company was already working on a fix. With no need for Distinctly to act as the ‘middleman’, the issue was quickly identified and measures rapidly implemented, allowing the Distinctly team to continue as normal, instead of wasting valuable time trying to fix it themselves.
