Safer Switching

Ofcom has recently announced further measures which are designed to make it easier to change telecoms provider.  Although various measures have been taken over the past few years to safeguard consumers, Ofcom research has found that 20% of consumers lost broadband services for a week when switching and that 130,000 households had the wrong line switched over within a 12 month period.

 Even more alarming the research revealed that 520,000 landline or broadband services were switched without consent (slamming) in the last 12 months.  The Ofcom proposals are designed to guard against slamming with measures including switches being verified by an independent third party and addressing technical issues on switching.

As part of this latest switching consultation, Ofcom are also proposing measures to ensure consumers have accurate information on the implications of switching, improving competition and simplifying the switching process.  Certainly any measures which reduce the down time on switching can only be good.  Whilst personal consumers may only have to worry about switching one telephone line, for a business customer with potentially multiple lines any time without access to the telephone can be disastrous. 

This is one of the reasons why Callagenix services are available on a free trial basis before clients make any commitment to the service.  We understand that, particularly when switching to a virtual switchboard service, you need to have time to ensure that the service works as you want it to.  This free trial time means you can spend time checking the service, setting answerphone parameters and pathways before letting the new service loose on your clients.  That way, when you do switch, you already know that your new internet service will work.

When clients switch from a manual switchboard service to a virtual switchboard they often have access to many additional services which were either not available or not cost effective on their old system.  Services such as caller recognition, auto call divert and call recording are easily available on a virtual switchboard and at a fraction of the cost of a manual system. 

The other benefit of switching to a virtual service is that there are no costly hardware implications.  In fact, we are so convinced that clients will be happy with our service excellence standards that many of our services are available on a pay as you go basis.  So, whether you are starting from scratch, need a new telephone number or are thinking of switching your service, have a look at the Callagenix free trial.