What is your name and your organisation?
Tim Meredith - VoIPstudio (Level 7 Systems)
What is your role at Level7?
I'm the Fractional Head of Growth at VoIPstudio, heading the go-to-market activities for UK, Ireland and North America.
How long have you been working for Level 7/been in the industry?
VoIPstudio has been established as a successful service provider for well over a decade, and I've been working with the team for the last 6 months.
What is your company's USP/key focus areas?
VoIPstudio is rapidly evolving as a Hosted Communications platform, providing business-grade telecoms services globally. VoIPstudio has a rapidly growing portfolio of call and contact centre features, including CRM and application integration, Call Recording, AI Analytics and much more. Our customers love that they get a rich feature set included for a simple, low monthly per-user cost, without having to pay an increased price for adding every "à la carte" feature. Our customers also really like the 30-day free trial we offer, which provides a great opportunity to fully explore the platform before paying their first bill. After this, there is no long-term commitment, which helps our clients grow their trust in us without lock-in.
What achievement is VoIPstudio most proud of?
Simply, it's our customer satisfaction! VoIPstudio has an average 4.7/5 score with Trustpilot, which is based on 1500+ authentic customer reviews. VoIPstudio employs some of the best people in the industry and a friendly support team with incredible knowledge and experience, which is often mentioned in our reviews. Another reason for getting such good reviews is our development team's speed and quality of output when it comes to launching new features - something as a marketer is even difficult to keep pace with! Other review platforms consistently show similar levels of extremely positive customer feedback, and our Comms Council award last year felt like great recognition for the team too.
What are the key trends that you are experiencing currently in the market?
This has been a tumultuous time for VoIP and UC, to say the least. Avaya's 200+ user market positioning, Mitel's impending chapter 11, and Skype being phased out. There hasn't been a better time for customers of traditional vendors to move to a true cloud/hosted platform and future-proof their communication and collaboration solutions. We're seeing increasing inquires across many vertical markets where businesses not only need to migrate to protect themselves, but are also tired of paying inflated prices for legacy systems that, in some cases, have been limiting their growth. After many attempts to resuscitate dying business models, this truly is the age of the legacy PBX finally being consigned to history.
What do you see as the main industry challenges at present?
Fraud is probably top of almost everyone's mind. Whether it's simple credit card theft or robocall fraud attempts on the public, every single voice platform in the world is facing a constant battle against hackers, scammers and general criminals. AI has a role to play here in heuristic analysis, with GPU-powered systems being able to speed up data-driven decisions, but we need to remember the human component. These systems need oversight to ensure they can discriminate between legitimate heavy users and bad actors, as well as spotting anomalies that AI cannot yet comprehend, but the human imagination is capable of. Criminals can be smart, but we need to be smarter.
If there was one thing in the industry you would change or want to resolve, what would it be?
Stop being scared of doing things differently by increasing diversity in your community of decision-makers. Whether it's feature development, UI/UX, or even sales and marketing, complacency is killing many businesses. I've spent a lot of my career going against the grain, arguing about the strategy of legacy PBX vendors and their suitability in a changing market. Ultimately, many decisions made in fear of "rocking the boat" actually hurt customers, who ended up being stuck with restrictive technology and a dissatisfaction with some service providers. In a recent blog post, I talked about being told repeatedly in my career that "big enterprises and public sector don’t want public cloud or even multi-tenant solutions", but look where we are today! Savvier customers looked elsewhere, to the innovators, and many good service providers lost out due to blinkered complacency.
What opportunities do you foresee for the sector?
Customer Experience (CX) is a great problem to solve for businesses. It's no longer enough to just "do voice". Service Providers and Vendors who can look beyond their technology stacks and products to think about their customer's customer will survive and thrive. Like any business, our customers want to gain and retain revenue, so if we can provide a broad spectrum of capabilities to help them do that and communicate it well, the rest is easy. This means integration with other applications to improve workflows and customer satisfaction, use of automations and AI to increase efficiency and reduce workload, and an extensible platform that can scale in capacity and functionality as the world changes.
What benefits do you get out of Comms Council UK membership?
CCUK primarily gives us a place to learn and network with a diverse range of industry peers. Representation to regulatory bodies and legislators is also an essential function in a world where regulation itself can be both a bad word and a vital protector of society at the same time. It's so important that we get the right balance here to help our industry grow safely and sustainably, so it's great that Comms Council is in our corner.
