My business, Hunt Revenue, has been around for about 12 years in its present form. We do international business development and communications for tech companies.
I used to be a consultant for many years and I’ve worked all over the world. Now we have 15 members of staff, with offices in London, Brussels and Malaga. We’re all consultants and we work within the e-commerce sector providing support primarily for technology and service companies but also do some work with retailers as well.
The nature of our business is our clients are spread all over the world; we have widespread geographical relationships, and therefore we use whatever communication system is appropriate. We have a conferencing facility for when we’re doing presentations and webinars, we have a telemarketing solution, and Vonage numbers which we use for private public communication so it doesn’t impinge on the other lines potentially being busy if everyone’s on the phone.
It was about four or five years ago that I heard an advert on local radio for Vonage, and from originally being used as our personal English telephone number, it’s now used as our private public network. What happens is we’ve got a group of numbers and lines for internal communication with clients and so on, but we wanted another group of numbers that could be private, and it’s grown exponentially. It started with one box in one place, and now we’ve got five or six numbers, virtual numbers and other features.
We use most of the Vonage services on offer. The company offers redirects and a whole bundle of added value services and virtual numbers, but there are a whole range of telecoms services.
If someone’s going into business, this is a great solid reliable tool. There are a number of people offering various VOIP solutions but we have stayed with Vonage which I’ve found to be an excellent service with excellent support.
Communication is key in all businesses but especially ours. We can’t do what we do unless we have great communication because our services have to be delivered using the internet. If we’re setting up office or someone’s working from home at any time we have to make sure bandwidth is there, and that they can actually do the job.
We have flexible working hours. We’ve had them in place virtually from the beginning. It started from me, I work all the time! My mindset behind giving people flexible hours is that your staff need to have to have a good quality of life. You should take account for your staff having lives outside work. Happy employees are engaged employees, and if people have to work from home, Vonage provides the solutions needed.
