24
Mar
Harrogate telecoms firm Xi Comms gaining customers at larger rivals' expense
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The director of a Harrogate telecoms company says his firm wins new customers every time a rival is taken over by a large national provider.
Martin Taylor of Xi Comms told the Stray Ferret that customers preferred the more responsive service local firms are capable of, and are often disappointed when their usual provider gets swallowed by one of the better-known names.
He said:
The typical pattern is that an aggressive company with access to capital – often based in the South East – will go out and buy up lots of companies around the UK. Once they’ve grown to a certain size, the owners go and sell it as a national company. We see it time and again.
The problem with that is that once the smaller business is part of the bigger group, the local people who work there often leave, and customer service suffers as a result.
Martin and Tony have decades of experience in the telecoms industry.
Xi Comms supplies advanced telecoms services to SMEs, including cloud telephony, business broadband, mobile phones, intelligent numbers and contact centre services.
The larger firms also provide these things, but Martin said they could not be trusted to provide the same level of service as local ones, because of the way they are set up.
He said:
The bigger the company, the more website pages you have to click through to find their phone number – because they don’t want to talk to you! It can be a huge source of frustration.
But with us, if there’s any issue, you can just call us – and you will actually speak to us, not a call centre or a chatbot.
Also, with big companies, people sign up as customers based on their relationship with the salesperson, but the field sales office then hands them over to an engineer, so it’s all disconnected.
With us, it’s all integrated, so you talk to the same people right throughout the process, and we have a vested interest in making sure it all works first time, every time.
He said that larger rivals often paid lots of attention to big clients, but left smaller ones underserviced.
He said:
If you’re a big bank, the big comms companies’ account managers are all over you like a rash, whereas if you’re a small high-street jeweller, they don’t want to know. But we love those businesses.
I put in a lot of due diligence to make sure a solution is really going to work for the customer. If it doesn’t, I’m the one who has to sort it.
Martin has had a long career in telecoms and spent much of his career working for larger companies before taking the reins at Xi Comms with business partner Tony Mellor 10 years ago.
He said he much preferred working for a smaller business that could take more care over its relationships with customers. He said:
It feels really good to be able to do a good job, and to have customers say good things about us – which they often do.
That's because we can provide a really high level of service. If a server needs rebooting or a customer needs to be shown how to use their new phone system, we can just pop in and do it. No London-based company would do that.
If people are looking for a local, friendly company with excellent customer service, we’re really good at that.
Find out more
For more information about how Xi Comms can help your business, visit our website here, or for an informal chat, call us on 0330 3339200.
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