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Boxx finalists in SME National Awards!

4th September 2020 by Kelly Green

Whilst 2020 has proved to be the most unpredictable of years, one thing that has remained consistent throughout is our determination to provide excellent service to each and every one of our customers, both existing and new...

We were thrilled to be recognised for our efforts in the MK & Bucks SME Awards back in February, where we won GOLD for ‘Service Excellence’, quickly followed by a finalist position in the prestigious MKBAA's for ‘Customer Service’ in March.

This month, we’re not only completing the hattrick, now we’re also 'going to Wembley!', where we’ve been announced as finalists in the SME National Awards again for ‘Service Excellence’.

James Green, Co-Owner at Boxx quotes:

Obviously with the current pandemic situation, the awards ceremony currently planned for December may end up needing to be rescheduled or take a different format, but despite any changes that may need to happen, we’re so proud of the team for the hard work they put in each and every day, and to recognised at a national level for their efforts, truly is an honour. Providing excellent service really is at the heart of everything we do here at Boxx and we’re delighted to be considered one of the best VoIP providers in Milton Keynes, as well as supplier of choice for gigabit internet in MK.

Dean Burgin, Co-Owner continues;

Since March, when lockdown was introduced and we were all advised to work from home wherever possible, we’ve not only helped our existing customers make the transition to remote working, but also taken on new clients with this as the priority focus. For some this was straightforward to implement, with the right tools, for others more of a challenge - But one we were happy to take on! We have made it our mission to ensure that the businesses we serve have access to the telecommunication services that will enable them to not only survive this year but also to plan ahead, post-COVID and fuel business growth in Milton Keynes and beyond.

Working with businesses large and small, providing telephony and internet connectivity in and around Milton Keynes, we work hard to make life easier for those who choose to work with us!

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COVID-19 Emergency Communications Toolkit

23rd March 2020 by Kelly Green

As we delve further into these unprecedented times, even businesses with the most robust disaster contingency plans in place could not have predicted the challenges organisations across the whole world are now facing and the uncertainty of times ahead.

Technology has changed the game

With the right technology, tools and solutions in place, businesses and the teams within them, ARE able to function in new ways, so we’ve been busy working with our customers to implement remote working solutions to enable them to continue to communicate, collaborate and serve their own customers as efficiently as possible, away from the workplace.

A culture of working-from-home has long been embedded at Boxx, so we have been able to quickly make the change to work away from the office ourselves, with no impact to service.

But, we’re conscious that for many this hasn't been quite so easy, so we wanted to share some of ways we’re trying to help businesses through this unsettling period of change, in what we've called our COVID-19 Emergency Communications Toolkit…

Enabling working from home

It is our priority to support businesses in following the Government's ‘social distancing’ advice and encouraging people to 'work from home' wherever possible.

For customers using traditional or onsite telephony solutions, we are able to set up immediate call diverts so that telephone calls can be re-routed to mobile phones.

For businesses who have migrated to a Hosted VoIP solution, calls are accessible via the desktop and mobile applications, so making and receiving work calls from home is easy.

Both of our main Hosted VoIP suppliers also offer a unified communications (UC) upgrade which include additional features to increase remote working collaboration and productivity, such as instant message, conferencing, screen sharing, and corporate directory access.

To enable more businesses to take advantage of these UC features during this period, we are offering a FREE UC upgrade of either; 4 months on our Horizon ‘Collaborate’ solution, or 3 months on our HV Select ‘UC Teams’ solution. To find out more about this offer, you can register your interest here (link).

As you can imagine, there has been a massive increase in the number of businesses wanting to urgently move to Hosted VoIP since the ‘work from home’ recommendations were made.

Usually, number porting timescales mean that provisioning new orders isn’t instant. But, recognising the urgency of the task in hand we have introduced an interim solution in order to get businesses up and running fast. Find out more about our emergency VoIP migration service here.

To support users of Horizon ‘Collaborate’ and to ensure both speedy and seamless implementation, we’ve been holding webinars about how to optimise this UC solution. Find out dates of upcoming webinars and/or register your interest here.

We’ve created a playlist of Horizon ‘Collaborate’ training videos on our YouTube channel to give additional support to users of this unified comms solution.

Communicating changes to customers

Whether you have had to make changes to your opening hours or need to advise of COVID-19 related restrictions that affect the way you do business, it is crucial to communicate this effectively to your customers.

We’ve introduced a half price Emergency Message offer to our professionally recorded on-hold message service, which advises your callers of any recent changes to the way your business is now operating, ensuring customers have access to up-to-date information and reducing the number of incoming phone calls and emails you need to answer.

Our web listings service allows you to update your company information on 50+ online platforms, all in one go using a simple, easy-to-use dashboard.

To get customers up and running fast, with no initial cost, we’re offering 1 month FREE access to this service.

What next..?

Obviously, it is still very early days in this UK pandemic and things are changing at an alarming rate.

Even with the ground-breaking announcements from the government about how they plan to financially support the country, the long-term impact to businesses and indeed the UK (and even global) economy is still unknown.

Here at Boxx we are committed to following the #StrongerTogether mantra and will continue to listen to our customers and provide as much support as we can to enable them to continue to work effectively, throughout these unsettling times.

We are all in this together!

Virtual Reality (VR) & Augmented Reality (AR)

17th August 2018 by admin

The technology industry moves so quickly that it’s hard to keep up with what has been released!

But, it has been very difficult to miss the growing Virtual Reality (VR) trend. For those of you who don’t know what VR is, here is a brief overview…

Virtual Reality is a computer-generated simulation or recreation of a real-life environment. The experience is immersive, with the end goal being that the user feels like they’re experiencing the simulation for real.

Virtual Reality has been around since the mid-20th century, believe it or not! It has been used for medical, flight and military training purposes.

2010 was the landmark for commercial VR uses when Oculus debuted their prototype Rift gaming headset. Now there are many gaming headsets out there, from the PlayStation VR to the HTC Vive.

However, there is another type of reality that could benefit us in ways other than gaming.

Augmented Reality, or AR for short, is another technology that has been around for a while that we may have overlooked as it isn’t being fully utilised by the masses now.

However, much like VR, AR is on the rise! But, how big of a role will they play in our day-to-day lives? Firstly, lets clarify what AR is.

Augmented Reality is a technology that layers computer-generated enhancements over the top of reality! The main reason for this is to make the existing reality for insightful and meaningful, mainly by making the tech layer interactive.

That’s how VR and AR differ; AR enhances the environment we live in whereas VR replaces it with a simulated reality.

So, where could you have seen Augmented Reality in action already? The best examples can be found on your mobile!

The are many games out there, from Pokémon Go to Zombie Run and even Jenga!

There are also other apps that use AR. Google Translate has a feature on the app that translates words when you place your camera over them. Snapchat had the famous AR dancing hot dog and the GIPHY World App lets you place GIFs and stickers all around you when you film!

AR and VR are still relatively new technologies, so whilst they have entered the commercial scene, there is only a small market for them currently.

However, here are some ideas on how these technologies could become part of our everyday routine…

• VR and AR could be used in the workplace to help better interactions with customers or other businesses through video chat or product selling through VR/AR.

• VR has been used in the past for training pilots, but it could be used for more educational work, both in training and in schools.

• AR could be used for e-commerce. Virtual showrooms are already being used and soon it could stretch to furniture, cars and even house tours.

• There are some experiments going on where VR and AR are being used in the courtroom so that decision makers can get more information.

• Finally, VR is being used to treat patients with PTSD, who knows what other treatments it could help with.

Some figures have also been released recently that suggest the market value in the UK of VR and AR will reach £354.3 million by 2020; globally, it should reach $215 billion by 2021!

There is our overview of AR and VR for you and we think it’s safe to say that these two technologies will be very important to us in the future!

UK Comms: Where do we stand?

20th July 2018 by admin

As a company now entering its teenage years, Boxx Communications has bared witness to many of the biggest and best changes in the telecommunications industry.

The notable movements include faster and more reliable broadband, the rapid growth of IP voice solutions and, of course, a steep fall in pricing.

To put into perspective the scale of these changes we have some statistics accumulated over 6 years, between 2011 and 2016.

In this period, the number of Fixed (Phone) Lines has remained steady; rising from 33.3 million to 33.7 million between 2011 and 2015 before falling back slightly to 33.5 million in 2016. This stability derives from the infrastructure that we adopt here in the UK: in order to have a broadband connection, a fixed telephone line is required.

The changes in numbers appear when looking at the activity on these lines;

The number of broadband connections increased by 22.2%; starting at 20.7 million connections in 2011 and rising to 25.3 million by 2016. The increases year upon year were very steady with jumps of 1 million give or take a couple of thousand.

What’s more staggering is 1 million of those 20.7 million connections in 2011 were fibre, yet by 2016 that figure has grown to an impressive 10.8 million! A growth of almost 2 million fibre connections per year and a total percentage growth of 980% in total. This really highlights the increasing availability of fibre services around the UK as well as the growing need for those ever-cheaper connections.

In similar fashion – mobile and landline minutes saw massive movements…

While the number of landline minutes accumulated each year fell by 46 billion (41.4%) to 65 billion, the number of mobile minutes increased by 20 billion (15.3%) to 151 billion.

These statistics highlight the movement away from the traditional landline as we move towards mobiles and IP solutions as our go to platforms for making calls.

As applications, such as iMessage and Whatsapp, come to the forefront, traditional MMS and SMS see less of the limelight. In 2016, 54 billion fewer texts were sent compared to 2011. Having said that, 96 billion were still sent.

In recent years, 4G has been the biggest technology to hit the mainstream. Despite this, 2016 figures show that 69% of data connections on mobiles took place over Wi-Fi. The remaining 31% of mobile data is broken down into 65% 4G, 30% 3G and 5% 2G.

In retrospect, the number of ADSL broadband connections fell to 13.6 million – a decrease of 6.2% compared to 2015.

The movement to higher capacity internet connections has seen the volume of data consumed by user’s skyrocket. Larger files have become easier to download meaning more and more are downloaded.

In 2016 alone, there was a 36% rise in the average users download numbers, a number that is expected to continue rising at a similar, if not faster, rate.

Now that we’ve covered how the UK looks, how do we compare to our fellow nations?

• We ranked 4th behind the US, China and Japan when it came to the revenue generated by voice and data services.

• Surveys shows that 98% of the UK has access to speeds of at least 10Mbps which puts us back in our favourite position: 4th.

• 92% of us can receive speeds of 30Mbps or greater but unfortunately, there’s a large drop-off in number that can receive full fibre services at just 2%, placing us 18th out of 20 on the list.

• 51% of us have used our mobiles to purchase a product online. In the U.S, 57% have.

• 9% of us have made social media our primary location to find the latest news compared to 16% in Australia.

• Only 59% of us are worried about the affect mobile ads have on our phones compared to the 71% in Spain.

• Surprisingly, only 51% of us compared to the 75% in Sweden use our phones to check our balance.

So it’s clear to see how the communications landscape has changed in the 6 year period of 2011 – 2016. A lot can happen in just 6 years. We’re excited to see what the next 6 years brings… 5G and Gigabit Internet are already making waves, but what next?!

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