Not a happy place
In the past few days we had a few customers contacting us to ask what were our contract terms.
My gut feeling is that there’s an offensive from some very determined salesmen doing the rounds and carpet-phoning businesses in this neck of the woods to make a quick buck promising to “save you a bundle on your phone bills”.
Please do not fall for these scammers, they’re recycled salesmen from some pyramid scheme, paid on commission for every customer won, without the faintest idea of what services you have, how they work or if really you are paying too much.
One of our customers was called by a company offering a very expensive external device “to connect to their phone lines” to manage incoming calls with a queue system. About two and a half grand of hardware cost, two grand of installation and a maintenance fee of £125 a month, excluding any initial customisation and subsequent changes to the set-up.
If I wasn’t there to fend off the attack, they might have lost time – and possibly money – to try and fit a system they didn’t need and couldn’t work because they have no “phone lines”.
Our PhoneBox VoIP PBX already has that feature included, at no cost, and can be activated and configured on your request at any moment, in a few minutes.
Another of our customers got their line slammed after a phone call where they explicitly said they were not interested. We had to go through to Court to regain access to our customer’s phone line. These sharks even produced a purported recording of the conversation they had where they had the consent from our customer.
Unfortunately for them this customer of ours is of Asian origin, his accent is quite strong and the person that was allegedly recorded was clearly from Glasgow.
Our customer got his broadband service cut off and because we had to go through legal proceedings, he was left offline for 35 days. That led to a loss of over £10’000 in sales.
We’re not trying to scare anyone from shopping around and squeeze out the best deal possible.
Just be aware that technology has moved in leaps and bounds and many traditional operators and companies are haemorrhaging customers right, left and centre, so are resorting to underhand tactics to replenish their customer base.
Often they’re not aware of the high level of technical complexity behind VoIP technologies and their heavy-handed approach invariably ends in tears and losses.
Please always, always come to us first and ask. We don’t bite.