We were thrilled to welcome a lovely bunch of our customers to the BT Assembly building in Bristol on Wednesday 4 October to hear all about SCG, our partners, and the technology available to support your business, team, and productivity. We had some brilliant guest speakers from EE, BT Group, and members of our own team including Paul Bradford, Claire Maddox, Nick Boulton, and Jamie Lewis.

The event was opened by our very own Nick Boulton as well as EE’s Andrew Tither, welcoming us to the impressive BT building, and introducing the day. Nick shared with everyone our new structure following the merger of three businesses, as well as introducing our SMT and team members.

CEO Paul Bradford shared the highlights of the SCG journey, from its founding in 1965 to its present as a market leader in 2023. Whilst the business may have changed and grown over the last 58 years, the commitment to customers and providing excellent customer service has remained unchanged. SCG is a business with the scale and financial strength of a corporate but with the autonomy to behave and look after its customers like a local SME!

Next up, Ruth Sanders from BT Group discussed the end of the PTSN network and the impact that the phase out will have on businesses. Whilst many businesses are thinking about their phone systems, this change will impact any analogue system that is connected to your phone line. From lift alarms to fix machines (there are a surprising amount still in regular use!) you need to consider what your next steps will be before they become obsolete in December 2025. It’s also worth noting that although the obsoletion is just over two years away, the phase-out is already impacting businesses with a stop-sell in place that’s stopping businesses adding new staff members to phone systems, updating greeting messages or redirecting calls. It may seem like a long time away, but now is the time to make the switch.

From there, Matt Franks shared the benefits of the Evonex hosted telephony platform, highlighting its unsurpassed reliability, UK-based teams, and ultimate flexibility. With network coverage becoming more important since COVID, we are sure that the 99.99% uptime and no single point of failure on the system is reassuring to our customers.

We also heard from Ian Boyce from SCG South West and Andrew Tither of EE about mobile and mobile security and the 5G network. EE has been chosen as a supplier by the blue light emergency services who are using their unparalleled coverage to help save lives. They’ve even conducted life-saving operations in the back of ambulances with a paramedic wearing a special glove, remotely-controlled over 5G by a surgeon elsewhere – how amazing is that?

With the ongoing impact of the pandemic, the mobile market has significantly changed over the last five years and the importance of mobile devices has grown. With 59% of entrepreneurs rating their mobile as their top tech to run their business, the importance of network coverage has increased. It’s worth asking how your business mobiles can work better – coverage, speed, resilience – to boost your productivity and efficiency. It’s also worth asking how you can protect your commercial data in the event a phone is lost or stolen, or an employee leaves.

Georgina Woodman of Mogers Drewett Solicitors shared their experience of working with SCG over the last two decades: they get it right, first time, every time and there has never been downtime during working hours in twenty years – we think that says it all, thank you Georgina!

Jamie Lewis from SCG South West spoke about switching the business mindset to think about IT in terms of productivity. If you’re not supporting your teams with the right tech, you are directly impacting their ability to do their jobs. It’s a change away from the break-fix model, but it costs you less in the medium-term to commit to your teams now than just to change things when they break.

Proactive IT management is the best way to manage your security and your systems to protect your business. It offers very real benefits in terms of productivity, but also in terms of protecting your employees, your data, and your IP.

Thank you to Jake Houghton from Clifton Photographic for talking about how technology has changed for their business over the last five years, and what an increasingly important role it has.Great to hear how good tech has supported productivity in their business and how having a proactive provider in SCG has helped them to be a more effective operator, saving them “countless hours of headaches.”

Our last (but not least) speaker of the day was our MD Claire Maddox, saying thank you to our clients, suppliers, and colleagues. Also talking all things innovation, and how it’s not just about innovation through tech, but innovation as a business, allowing us to bring you the scale of a corporate provider, with the personal customer service of an SME.

“Every customer is unique. If we can understand what makes your business different, and what challenges you face, we can be an asset bringing you the best, most relevant solutions. We’re here to do the right thing by you”.

A wonderful day spent hearing all about the latest tech, support and developments for our clients – we hope to see you again soon!