Forsyth Business Centres operate a number of business centres in locations throughout the UK and beyond, including London, Edinburgh, Leeds, Sheffield, Stirling, Watford, Belfast, Shenzhen, China and Hong Kong. The company provides a flexible service which is designed to suit all business requirements, from fully serviced office accommodation on a licence basis, through to traditional office space to let on a conventional lease basis. They also offer a full range of virtual office services, video conferencing, meeting room and hot desk facilities.
Forsyth offers tenants the ability to be up and running, with phones and internet access, in just 24 hours. A service which they describe as one which ‘takes the hassle out of your property, communications, IT and administrative support needs, leaving you to concentrate on what matters most to your business’. As a result of the company’s success to date, it is continually expanding, with the newest facility having recently opened in Belfast. But of course, to enable the business to provide all of these services to tenants, it needs to have the right infrastructure in place first.
This has been achieved thanks to the long-standing and very close relationship which they have with Samsung Platinum partner STL Communications. The relationship has been developed over the last seven years and has enabled the management team at Forsyth to confidently specify the right communications solution every time they set up a new business centre. David Hall, Associate Director for the company, with responsibility for the communications infrastructure, commented:
“Reliability is a key factor for us, and this is never more important than when communications are involved. Our customers will simply not tolerate a phone system that doesn’t work properly and they must have a phone on the desk on day one that does the job. It’s integral to their business and must be 100% reliable, so Samsung is our product of choice every time we open a new site.
The system has some really nice features and is very user friendly. It does everything that we need it to, it ticks all the boxes and has never been found wanting. From our point of view, the most important thing is that the phone system helps us to win business. It’s a marketing tool. Tenants are more likely to sign up with us if the technology we offer them is right. Business centres are designed to provide a service and that includes communications technology. It’s even more important for our tenants than it is for our own employees.”
STL Communications installed a Samsung OfficeServ 7400 at the Belfast business centre in early 2007, and will soon be installing a new 45-extension OfficeServ 7400 at Forsyth’s new Centre at Thorpe Park in Leeds. The Belfast site has 30 extensions currently, but the business centre has the capacity for 300 tenants in total in the future. In reality this will probably equate to around 70 companies, with a mix of sizes from very small two or three person business, up to organisations which may possibly want to take a whole floor. Both systems offer a wide range of telecoms features for tenants including voicemail, DDIs, operator consoles, sophisticated call routing capability and so on, everything you would expect from a top of the range communications solution. David explained further about the Belfast implementation:
“We have linked the Samsung OfficeServ to a PC-based software solution which brings up the exact details of how that tenant’s calls should be answered as soon as someone rings in. The system already tags incoming DDIs so that the operator knows which company name to answer the call with, but the additional software solution takes it to the next level. This means that anyone can pick up a phone even if they are not a trained operator, and they will instantly see exactly how to answer the call correctly. It makes it much easier to manage and also leaves less room for human error.
It’s a huge responsibility to look after all of our tenant users properly, so we need to work with a supplier that we can trust totally. I do manage most of the adds, moves or changes myself but STL Communications also have remote management access to our systems for monitoring or fixing of problems if we need it. Having said that, the Samsung hardware is very robust and it’s usually only software issues that occur, if anything.
Recently we had a problem with an auto backup which usually runs nightly. When I arrived in the morning I could immediately see that something had gone wrong overnight, so I called the helpdesk and they talked me through the necessary fix. We were up and running again in five minutes and I very much doubt that our tenants had any idea at all that something had even been wrong. STL Communications are excellent. They respond quickly, solve problems when they do occur and always help us out when we need it.”
Forsyth Business Centres and STL Communications will continue to work together to implement the latest technology at future sites, as well as upgrading existing ones when new systems or features are released. It’s a business partnership which has worked well for the company and which has also added a huge amount of value for its tenants.