Telecoms and IT for Professional Services Firms

Yes, and it is usually the reason firms move. A softphone app on the handset they already carry makes and receives calls through the phone system, so the firm's number shows on outbound calls instead of a personal mobile, and an inbound call can be transferred back into the office rather than dying in someone's personal voicemail. It needs a reasonable data connection to sound right, so a client basement with no signal is still a client basement with no signal — but the mobile network carries it where the client's guest Wi-Fi will not.

Yes, and the untangling is worth more than the rate. Lines move onto one account spanning EE, O2 and Vodafone with a single invoice and a per-user breakdown, an individual connection can change network without changing supplier, and renewal dates can be pulled together as contracts come up rather than staying scattered across the year. Start with an itemised bill rather than a quote, because the biggest number in most estates is not the tariff — it is lines still running for people who left and allowances sized for a job somebody else does.

With device management in place it is an administrative task rather than an incident. The account is disabled and company email, files and saved credentials come off the device the same afternoon, and the line is recovered or reassigned rather than quietly left running. On a personal phone the work profile is separate, so a selective wipe removes company information and leaves photographs, messages and everything else untouched. It is worth saying that plainly to staff before rolling it out — this is not tracking, and rollouts fail far more often on that conversation than on the technology.

Only if you can say what for, because switching recording on is the easy part and the decisions around it are not. Retention is the one that catches firms out: every recording is personal data you are responsible for, so keeping everything indefinitely increases your exposure rather than reducing it, while ninety days is no use in a dispute about what was agreed last year. Playback should go to a named short list with access logged, and in almost all circumstances callers need to be told — the announcement is most often missed on outbound calls. We configure all of it; the policy, and the legal advice behind it, stay with you.

By counting them, which almost no firm does. Reporting shows calls answered, missed and abandoned — including callers who waited and rang off, who are invisible otherwise — broken down by time of day, by team and by the number dialled. The pattern matters more than the total: misses cluster at lunchtime, on one day of the week, or in the fortnight two people are on holiday, and that turns a vague staffing worry into a specific change. A live wallboard is a different thing again, worth having where answering the phone is somebody's whole job and not much use in a firm where it is not.

No. We do the communications and the network underneath them — mobiles, telephony, connectivity, device management, security and support. Practice management, CRM, document management and time-recording systems come from elsewhere, and we would not sell against the ones you already run without a reason. What we will do is make sure the phone system sits alongside them sensibly and that the connectivity they depend on is sized for the firm you are now rather than inherited from whoever fitted out the office.