BCH MD interviewed in Comms Dealer
When Andrea Wilson-Brown became Managing Director of BCH Digital in 2009 she wasted no time in developing the potential within the company, drawing on years of impressive achievements and experience in the telecoms industry.
Wilson-Brown began her telecoms career over 15 years ago at Freetime Communications where she worked her way up from administration assistant to Managing Director in just three years. She turned the company around from a struggling business with one product to a successful telco with a portfolio of over 30 products. Leaving Freetime in 2005, she took time out to fulfil a life long ambition to travel. Refreshed on her return in 2006 Wilson-Brown set up telecoms reseller T1 Telecoms prior to joining BCH. "Having worked with BCH for many years as a reseller I joined the team in 2008 for a fresh challenge and to utilise my experience in bringing products to market," she commented.
So far she has overseen a company rebrand, launched a new website and is in the process of developing new products. But the BCH story began in 2000 when big ambitions to realise the potential for hosted, hassle-free telecoms solutions prompted entrepreneurs Rob Macdonald and Andy Haigh to set up the company. With their technical expertise and using flexible IVR platforms rather than traditional switches, they set about developing new services quickly in comparison to the lead time required for planning and procuring in-house equipment. Initially providing IVR solutions, this format was then copied when BCH moved into SMS solutions in 2004.
That same year saw BCH acquire its hardware supplier, Everyware UK. Its founder and director, Mark Franklin, joined the BCH board, and the acquisition enabled BCH to offer hardware solutions as well as hosted. In 2008 Wilson-Brown joined BCH as Sales Director and was promoted to Managing Director in 2009. "BCH has always worked with individual clients to understand their needs and develop specific solutions for them," commented Wilson-Brown. "We see this market continuing into the future, focusing on key clients and looking for sophisticated bespoke solutions."
As a result of knowing precisely what clients require, BCH (which stands for Business Call Handling) has developed a larger range of off-the-shelf products that are being resold through its key channel partners. "We see this branch of the business being further enhanced and growing through more reselling opportunities and the development of a larger range and greater diversity of product," added Wilson-Brown. "To assist resellers in building their client base and profile, we are also happy for all of our products to be white-labelled, with our technical support available in-house when needed."
BCH products have evolved through good relations with clients, getting feedback, gaining a wider knowledge of different working priorities, systems, and processes, and adapting products accordingly. Staying abreast of changes in directives and legislation effecting the industries BCH works with is absolutely key. With a shift towards flexible working and all of BCH's solutions enabling remote access, the company expects demand to continue growing. "Combine that with the publicity cloud computing is generating, the SME market in particular is growing more aware of the benefits and cost effectiveness of hosted services," noted Wilson-Brown.
Top end customers, as always, will be looking for more bespoke services, but with greater links back into their own back end CRM and document management services, such as with call recording. This will no doubt trickle down to the SME market, observes Wilson-Brown. "Although BCH focuses on the supply of services, there is also a market for client side systems modelled on BCH's own systems and services, but installed for the client and owned by the client. We see this market complementing BCH's traditional products for those clients that really have to own their own systems," she added. "We will also be developing more SMS products to enable our clients to offer alternative forms of communication with the end user. This is in line with the increased use and growing preference for SMS in some areas of communication."
BCH's products are under constant in-house development, with new features being added on a regular basis. This ensures off-the-shelf solutions are competing with the most up-to-date products in the marketplace as well as providing building blocks for bespoke client solutions. "Our clients know how capable we are technically, so they've never been shy to ask us 'is this possible'," added Wilson-Brown. "We have a great knack of taking a simple statement, which describes a complicated technical issue but then still provide a simple solution as the end result."
Not surprisingly BCH is owned and managed by primarily technical people who are good at understanding what problems clients face and enjoy creating the easy to use solutions. "Producing a bespoke solution requires the ability to understand what is possible in terms of programming and be creative in how it is implemented, to meet the customer's requirements and the expectations of their end-users," said Wilson-Brown. "We also try to add value with every project and go one step further than matching a client's requirements. We like to explore all the possibilities with the client and provide them with valuable suggestions on what else is possible. Combining this with our resilient infrastructure, enabling us to handle large volumes, and surges in demand when needed, we can also implement and adapt complex solutions quickly and efficiently."
A new solution in the product pipeline is Virtual Receptionist, offering more flexibility and greater control over how inbound calls are managed. "As well as our standard features such as call recording, call queuing and missed call alert, its multi level menu structure enables complex routing solutions, whereby each final option from the menus can then be linked to a pre-existing service, therefore allowing multi delivery options via various hunt group methods," commented Wilson-Brown. "We are also working on expanding our outbound call recording platform. We will release more information on this development early next year."
For further details, images and interview requests please contact Lou Goodwin on lou@bchdigital.com, Tel: 0844 556 7067
