This year’s Lineal Client Survey 2020 saw hugely positive feedback, and record customer satisfaction results for our staff – thank you to all who took part.

2020 has been a turbulent year so far, but our positive improvement in the quality of our technical services continues from similar results during recent years. (Past Client Survey Results: 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016)

A record high number of you (76%) felt we “understand your questions and/or problems” “Extremely Well”. This is the most people who have ever awarded us the top grade, and represents long-term progress: over double the quality score we received back in 2015.

We asked an important supplementary question this year: how did you feel our IT Teams supported you during the Covid-19 lockdown specifically? Respondents graded us strongly, with a mean average of 4.45 stars out of 5.

For the first time, more than 70% of respondents considered our overall customer support “Great” – also the highest grade available, and twice our score from five years ago.

We also continued to make steady progress on our speed of responsiveness: more than 50% of you now feel we respond ‘Quicker’ than expected, and for the first time more than 20% of you considered us to be “Much Quicker” than expected – again: a rating we’ve doubled in recent years.

Lineal’s Net Promoter Score – an industry wide metric for good customer service which asks whether respondents with consider referring our services to a friend or colleague, rose to +56 this year, our best score to date.

Your feedback helps us identify areas of weakness where we still have room to improve: and to focus training and other resources on ensuring our clients receive the best service possible. In this coming year, we’ll be looking at ways to track our progress more steadily over time.

• “Staff show an understanding of the issues and are dedicated to resolving them and formulating a constructive outcome cost effectively. It is not so much about a quick response and service, it’s more the fact that the staff take ownership of the problems.’
• “We love Lineal.  So helpful and understanding of our needs.  No other company matches up to the efficiency of them.  Big thanks to Paul and Hugo!”
• “When we moved from Outlook 365 Home to Business we could not have had more support.”
• “Fantastic service! They helped me find a replacement iMac when mine died, and the service they give is exemplary! Highly recommended! 10/10.”

For expert IT Support and technical services, please contact us today.

We recently attended the 2020 Gamma Communications Roadshow at Stamford Bridge – hearing the latest business telecoms and technology trends from across the UK. But what do businesses need to be aware of?

Clock Ticking for ISDN

BT will officially turn off all ISDN services by 2025, with the ‘stop-sell’ order coming as early as 2023.

With UK businesses just getting used to putting ‘2020’ on paperwork, this is no longer a drill – if your phone system uses ISDN, your business needs to begin preparing to switch to a digital services such as SIP or better still, a hosted VOIP platform.

There are perhaps as many as 1.5 million ISDN channels still in use by businesses across the UK. Gulp.

Ultrafast Fibre Rollout Gathers Pace

Superfast broadband (‘Fibre to the Cabinet’ or FTTC) prices are falling all the time, but the big story of the decade is likely to be the steady roll-out of ultrafast ‘Fibre to the Premise’ to many more businesses – to around 40% availability over the next few years.

Salisbury is the first single-year rollout ‘test’ area trialling complete fibre infrastructure (booking a new copper line in the Salisbury area is likely to be rejected).

Interested in fibre for your area? Perhaps you should speak to your friendly neighbourhood IT provider…

Not all 5G is born equal

We’ve known for a while how the smallest of the UK’s four mobile networks (Three Mobile) is arguably in the best position to deliver data, although it’s now becoming clear Three has an enviable technical advantage over some of the other major providers – and is even using the cheeky marketing slogan: ‘If it’s Not Three, It’s Not Real 5G’.

The reserved spectrum range favours Three to such an extent that EE/BT, O2 and Vodafone have all submitted strongly worded complaints over preferential access. Gulp.

Microsoft Teams Telecoms Emerges

Among Gamma’s most exciting news was the announcement of a Direct Call Routing service for Microsoft Teams – which effectively plugs into the back of Teams and Microsoft’s ‘Phone System’ PBX add-on, to turn your Microsoft Teams software into a fully fledged business phone system.

Until now Microsoft’s Teams platform has been a strong option for video/audio conferencing, screenshare, instant messaging and collaboration – but have always lacked the more robust business call-handling feature-set of true phone systems, or suffered from a shortage of physical handsets. With both of those challenges solved by Gamma and the Teams app available on a variety of devices, it’s easy to imagine Teams phones appearing on desks.

Direct Routing for Teams is expected from April 2020. The final pricing is likely to be somewhere in the region of between £15-25 a month per user (including Microsoft Office licensing) – finally unifying telecoms under the same single user account as Microsoft Office 365 hosted email, files storage, office apps and collaboration software. Watch this space.

For communications services and expertise, please contact our team today.

It’s 2020! Looking back at recent years, we thought we’d share articles we wish we’d written – some of the most fascinating and most thought-provoking technology pieces from across the internet.

1. “… Close to a fifth of the entire world’s shipping capacity, was dead in the water”

• Surely a Hollywood movie waiting to be made. Couriered by hand from Ghana to London, how one last hardcopy backup saved a $55 billion coporate empire from total destruction.

NotPetya – The story of how Ransomware nearly destroyed Maersk Shipping – WIRED

2. “… The Millennium Bug was Real.”

• Twenty years on, the Guardian looks back at 100-year video rental fines, power cuts in Istanbul, and the little-known efforts of software developers worldwide to avert Y2K.

The Millenium Bug was Real, and 20 years later we face the same threats – Guardian

3. “… Microsoft was never really sure if it wanted to beat the iPhone, Android, or both.”

• Colourful designs, a good name in tech, and the soul of Nokia. But where did it all go so wrong?  The Rise and Fall of Windows Phone

Windows Phone was a Glorious Failure – The Verge

4. “… everyone has different lifestyles and levels of paranoia”

• A scorched earth strategy against data-hungry Google is more possible than you might imagine: with some handy tools from Google themselves to eliminate your account piece by piece.

How to set your Google Data to Self-Destruct – NY Times

5. “… I stared at the cursor. Eventually, I typed “nytimes.com” and hit enter. Like a freaking dad.”

• New York Times Magazine laments the creeping homogenisation of online communities, in: I Don’t Know How to Waste Time on the Internet Anymore

I Dont Know How to Waste Time on the Internet any more – NY Times Mag.

For IT Support and technical expertise, please contact our team today