Background of Switch
Switchconnect is one of the fastest growing communications businesses in the UK.
Switch is a technologically innovative business specialising in delivering high quality services through its own network infrastructure. Our customers include councils, multi-national corporations, telecoms companies and thousands of other businesses both in the UK and abroad.
Our services include:
- Number Supply and Provision
- Inbound Call Handling
- Bespoke Call Platforms (IVR)
- SMS and Text Services
- Internet Services
- Voice over IP (Broadband Telephony)
Our philosophy is to provide the best in customer service delivered through resilient and proven products. We pride ourselves on listening to our customers, understanding their requirements, and designing our products and services around their needs.
Why Switch?
Many reasons! Aside from the fact that we are great people to work with we could mention that we offer excellent customer service, leading edge technology, great technical support and much more.
But from a practical perspective, given that you are probably in this site to buy numbers, here are some other reasons:
1. Confidence - we own and operate our own number ranges and infrastructure
This means when you buy numbers from Switch, it is entirely within our control for the lifetime of the number. Unlike many other companies selling numbers on the web we are not reselling other peoples numbers.
When businesses do this, they are subject to changes within the company from whom they purchased numbers. As an example, we recently picked up 200 business customers from a company whose number provider had increased the charges which meant they could no longer continue service for their customers without losing money!
Fortunately, we were able to migrate the numbers across to our service with the minimum of fuss and importantly without loss of service to the companies using the numbers.
Many companies who purport to offer FREE numbers do so on the basis that their number provider will ALLOW them to do so but they do not have ANY future guarantees.
That means that if you choose a number from one of those companies, you could order a number, print your marketing material, company brochures, letterheads etc using that number and then find that the company who sold you the number can not support it any longer without losing money.
What are your choices then? Do you think you could talk to the telecoms company who owns the number and ask them to continue service? No. These companies are generally large corporate businesses whose pricing plans do not entertain customers who want FREE numbers. You are then faced with the probability of either, changing the number and losing the money on the marketing material, or paying a fee for a number you thought was free. Either way you pay.
Finally, what happens when something goes wrong? As we own and manage our own network, we can make the changes necessary to ensure your service continues smoothly and efficiently.
2. Support - we are a real company with real people to talk to
Unlike many other companies offering numbers on the web, we have a customer service department there to answer your questions during normal working hours and a technical support function operating out of hours.
Many companies seem to offer support only through email which aside from being a remote way of communicating with people as a "conversation", it also pre-supposes that you have access to the Internet when you need assistance. For example, occasionally our clients contact us because they need an urgent number re-mapping and are not in a position to go online and complete the change themselves. In addition quite often people forget the pin codes needed to be able to dial into our service and change the mapping but still need it done as quickly as possible.
If you had to email us to make the change which may take days, what would be the impact to your business?
Note: Calls may be monitored and recorded for training and quality assurance purposes, we do this to protect you as a customer.
3. Security - communications is the life blood of every business
At any one time if you are trawling the web to find the best deal on numbers, you are likely to find a number of companies selling numbers they do not own as previously discussed. What you may not know is that these businesses tend to come and go fairly frequently.
Before ordering a new number, ask yourself this question:
"If I order a number for my company, and a few months later that number is taken away from me, what would be the impact to my business?"
There are hundreds of horror stories about just that thing happening, and the cost cannot be measured just against the price of printing stationary etc, but in the loss of business and image that usually goes with it. Plus the time taken to deal with the problem.
So before you choose your next number supplier, why not complete a credit check or at least review the background of the business before you make your decision?
Pricing Philosophy
It is simple economics that in order to build a strong reliable business with up to date services and good customer care, you need to be able to deliver sufficient margin to pay for it.
With that in mind we constantly monitor the market rates of our competitors and adjust our promotions to compete effectively without ever compromising our business or standards of service.
However, we appreciate that everyone wants to know they are getting good value for their purchases, so we also tend to add value into our packages wherever possible. So, on a like for like basis you will find we add more features, functions and service for less money than virtually anyone else. And we structure it so even the smallest businesses can get the same kind of value for money and service levels as our largest customers.
Infrastructure
Switch has its own telecommunications network infrastructure, with switching equipment located in both Birmingham and London.
Based around a simple network architecture we have our main switch housed in a dedicated telecoms facility in London. In this location we have added IVR (Intelligent Voice Response) systems and web systems that enable us to develop bespoke applications using voice technologies.
In Birmingham we have a co-located facility where we house two additional IVR systems one of which is a mirror to our London operation. This provides us with both capacity and disaster recovery systems, as well as the opportunity to build and test applications without using the live client environments.
In total we have over 600 channels of inbound IVR and a switch with the ability to upgrade to 16,000 simultaneous calls. In addition we have recently added a further 270 channels of VoIP equipment to service our clients in both the UK and internationally.
However, the real technical infrastructure lies with the people who build the systems and deliver the applications to our clients. In that we have a very strong team of dedicated technical developers, specialising in software design, systems integration and web applications.
This means that whatever the client application, regardless of size, we know we have the capability to build and deliver it.
For more information please feel free to call us on 0345 652 2222 or email us by clicking here