Forum Events

The Background

With over 10 years experience in offering events to 1000s of customers, Forum Events is one of the UK's leading business-to-business event organisers, specialising in targeted events that connect like-minded clients and suppliers together.

Forum Events’ overriding aim is to offer high quality and rewarding events to all guests and participants at the best possible venues. Each attendee’s time is maximised by matching the interests of buyers and suppliers in advance; ensuring that people only meet those who have a genuine interest in each others business.

By hosting the Forums in excellent surroundings, business partners can be assured that their experience will be of real value, productive and friendly.

The Challenge

As with any sales and customer servicing focussed operation the telephone is business critical to Forum Events. With a 40 strong and still growing telesales team its s not unusual to have 30 + concurrent calls on the go therefore they needed a solution that could support this without a shudder and have the flexibility to grow to 10 x times that number is a must.

On moving offices Forum Events felt it was the ideal time to look into acquiring a new telephone solution that fitted with their business operations and their ambitions.

Prior to moving the company was prohibited by the solution offered by their serviced office. They had no choice in what type of phone solution they could use, the phones they had were basic but despite that they felt were paying grossly over the odds for the service.

The Solution

Forum Events decided to find a new solution and sourced advice from three companies, offering different products and systems.

1RedCube, a Voicenet Solutions dealership offered hosted VoIP with Cisco 7941 phones and free UK landline calls. Forum Events, with a philosophy of choosing the highest standards in technology, were initially attracted to the advanced hardware provided, but the offer of free calls interested them, though they were not certain what proportion of UK landline calls the company made.

Forum Events decided to conduct an audit of it own telephone usage and call patterns. After 3 days of logging and scrutinising each call they realised that the whole office called UK landline numbers 76% of the time, a substantial proportion. In choosing the Voicenet Solutions service Forum Events would have the chance of taking three-quarters of all company calls off the balance sheet thus offering the company the opportunity to make significant savings.

Benefits

The effect of having a new phone solution has transformed communications at Forum Events. As well as the substantial savings realised, the company is now using features the previous system simply didn’t offer. Features such as Hunt Groups, Pick-up groups and Follow Me are being employed which enables Forum Events to answer more calls and service their customers more effectively.

Furthermore Forum Events is beginning to make use of remote working, one of the major features of a hosted VoIP solution. They are able to use a soft-phone at separate events thus having a virtual front desk for customers to easily contact partners at specific forums and events.

“1RedCube has given us a high level of service since the day we got in touch. Their support combined with Voicenet Solutions technology and pricing has given us an enhanced communications solution with significant savings.” Ciaran Pugh, Forum Events