Category: Weekend

something for the weekend – interesting non work related posts

Categories
Business competitions video

Video competition

Following on from a post I made in June regarding Polycom putting over a hundred videos on YouTube I have started exploring this myself.

The video at end of this post is my first post on YouTube (timicocto) where I have uploaded details of a video competition that we are running at Timico in July. The hope is that we will get some good material to post on the company website.

Ultimately we will be looking at broadcasting live and this is a step towards that goal.

I’ll report back on how it went when it is all over and done. Sorry – the competition is open to company employees only.

 

 

Categories
Business events

ITSPA Summer Bash

 If you want to come to this event let me know or contact the Secretariat

ITSPA SUMMER FORUM

 

Hosted by ITSPA Member BT

 

Wednesday 9th July 2008 

 

BT Auditorium

81 Newgate Street

London EC1A 7AJ

(near St Paul’s Tube Station)

 

1pm – Registration & Refreshment

 

1.30pm-ITSPA AGM (members only)

 

INDUSTRY FORUM

 

2.30pm – Keynote Interview with Andy Abramson

 

3pm – ‘SME’s & VoIP’

Interactive Panel Discussion

 

3:45pm – Break

 

4pm – Regulatory Update / Q&A

including discussion about the impending 999 deadline in September

 

4:45pm –  ‘Unified Communications and Convergence: The Facts & Fiction’

Interactive Panel Discussion

 

5:30pm – Drinks + Canapés

 

Please RSVP to Phil or Brett at the ITSPA Secretariat as soon as possible to confirm your place: [email protected] or 020 7340 1422

Categories
Business fun stuff

Listening to the voice of the customer

Timico lives or dies by the quality of the service it provides its customers. The continuous improvement to the service levels is something built in to framework of the business.

 

Monday morning is “Voice of The Customer” morning where complaints and feedback from customers received during the previous week are looked at by senior management.

 

You might argue that a business with its house in order should not receive any complaints. However with somewhere in the region of 10,000 businesses entrusting the care of their communications to us there is potentially always going to be someone with a problem – typically “my phone line hasn’t been working for three days” or “something has gone wrong with my broadband”but it can be more serious.

 

We look at whether there could have been a better way to service the customer with the problem or whether there is an improvement that could be made to our process. If necessary a director level member of staff will own the communications back to that customer.

 

In fact the contact details of each Timico board member are available on the website so that customers can reach senior people directly if they believe that the system has let them down for any reason.

 

Happily there are weeks where no specific complaints have been received and the occasion is used to talk about general ways of improving the service.

 

Categories
End User fun stuff

Generation Y in action

Here’s a link to my son’s website.

 

http://www.tom-davies.net/frontpage.html

 

He hosts a radio programme in Lincoln and is encouraging listeners by making his website interactive.  You can register to become a member of the “Wake Up To The Weekend” Nation and also vote online for members of the “National Government” There is even a pictorial security code that you have to enter when you register “for security purposes”

 

He is 16.

 

The point is that this generation does this instinctively. The revolution is only just beginning.

Categories
Business travel

Business travel costs being cut

More indicators pointing towards businesses cutting down on their travel spend with a boom in the low cost hotel market.

See this link from the Daily Telegraph for more

Categories
Business fun stuff

Hello world!

This blog has been started to enable me to comment on what is relevant to  consumers of communications products in businesses in the UK. The industry is going through a more rapid change than it has ever seen and perhaps for the first time we are beginning to  see how VoIP and the IP revolution is going to move telephony on from straightforward voice. With the advent of Web2.0 we are moving on from searching for the killer app (and deciding in the absence of being able to find anything that it must be voice after all!) to experiencing a rich mix of communications capabilities and services. What is more our imaginations are being inspired to come up with new ideas at an unprecedented rate.

 

Having seen it all start in the consumer space companies are now beginning to understand how to apply web based services for business. At Timico, for example, we use the whole gamut of technologies that might be considered to have started in the consumer space and moved into B2B (presence, IM, blogs, wikis, VoIP to name but a few). We were the first service provider in the world to introduce SIP trunks based on the AS5200 SIP platform to the Nortel BCM PBX and first to provide a mix of Nortel hosted carrier-side Unified Comms services as an overlay to Enterprise products.

 

Capabilities that might have historically been in the  domain of the  large enterprise  are now entering the world of the smaller businesses. Access to smaller customers is being made easier by the advent of e-business. Reach is increasing and costs are coming down.

 

There are other interesting dynamics at work. The move to a web based environment is creating a huge demand for collocation space at a time when power is at a premium and the green agenda is coming to the fore. This is in turn bringing forward developments in power reduction and the implementation of virtual technology. Increased web usage is driving up costs for ISPs whilst at the  same time users expect to pay less. Investment decisions are becoming more complex as are the technologies needed by business and as a result outsourcing is becoming more and more the norm.

 

It is an exciting time to be playing the game and in this blog I will be discussing what’s new, what’s useful and hopefully having a good time whilst at it.