What 15 years in UK business communications taught me

Our engineers at circle.cloud can usually tell within five minutes of walking into a business whether anyone there actually chose the phone system. Not from the brand on the box. From who understands it. Ask three questions and you'll know your own answer too: who last changed the voicemail greeting, who could explain the call routing without opening a manual, and when it breaks, do you call a person who fixes it, or a queue?

I've spent fifteen years on both sides of that question: selling phone systems, supporting them, and now building one. Here's what those three questions actually tell you, and what to do if you don't like your own answers.

The tell is who understands it, not what it does

A system that was actually chosen gets looked after. Somebody updates the greeting when the opening hours change. Somebody can say why calls route the way they do. A system that was assigned just runs, unattended, until it can't: the greeting is still the one the previous office manager recorded, the one person who set up the call groups left two roles ago, and everyone else has learned to work around whatever it does wrong rather than fix it, because fixing it isn't really anyone's job.

Our engineers see this most weeks: an accountancy practice, a salon, a firm two owners removed from the one who signed the original contract. The lease outlived the person who took it out. Nobody would call the phone system theirs, and it shows in exactly those three questions - the greeting, the routing, the call for help.

One example that comes up more than you'd think: a call comes in out of hours, or for a department that's moved desks since the system was set up, and it rings a number nobody's picked up in months, because whoever built that routing left before anyone thought to check it still made sense. Nobody's being careless. It's just that a system nobody chose is also a system nobody watches.

Why the fix usually isn't in the vendor's hands either

circle.cloud, the UK telecoms company I started in 2015, has installed and supported phone systems for small UK businesses ever since. It's grown from a desk and a phone to more than a hundred people, still fully bootstrapped, and for most of that time we've resold other companies' platforms, PBXware among them. Reselling works fine right up until a customer needs something the platform genuinely doesn't do. Then the honest answer is that we raise it with the vendor and wait, and the customer's problem sits in someone else's queue, priced by a seat count neither of us controls.

That's not a dig at any one vendor. It's the shape of most of UK business communications: reseller after reseller selling the same handful of platforms, so the person who knows your business best is usually the person with the least power to actually fix what's wrong with your phone. Worth asking before you sign the next contract: if this doesn't do what I need next year, can the person selling it to me build that, or are they as stuck as I'd be?

What we changed when we stopped reselling

We started We UC in 2021 to answer that question for ourselves rather than keep passing it on to customers. It's a 20-person team now, and the point of writing our own code, rather than configuring someone else's, is that when a customer needs something the product doesn't do yet, that's a decision we get to make, not a ticket we file. The recording, the transcription and the summaries run on servers we operate ourselves, so none of it depends on a vendor's roadmap either.

What to check on your own system

Go back to the three questions. If you can't answer them well, that's not a verdict on the phone system's features. It's a sign the tool was handed to your business rather than picked by it, and that's worth fixing before the day it actually matters - a member of staff who leaves, a busy period, a call you needed to have gone well. You don't need to rip anything out to find out where you stand. Ask whoever's nearest the phones this week who last touched the greeting, and whether they could explain the routing to a new starter without guessing. If the honest answer is a shrug, that's your answer to the bigger question too. I've written the fuller story of why we built Olatti if you want the longer version of how we got from reselling to building.

If your business is still running the system nobody chose, have a look at what a modern business line looks like, or try Olatti for free (opens in a new tab).