The Client

Pure West Radio is a community radio station in south-west Wales serving residents of Pembrokeshire with the latest local news and music with a host of local presenters.

With broadcasts running 24/7 they’re relied upon to deliver up-to the-minute news on the local area and are reliant on their close connections to the community for delivering their news and working with commercial partners.

And with a team of 70 running out of their studio and ‘in the field’ being able to communicate consistently and know the phone is manned at the studio at all times is critical.

The Challenge

Pure West Radio first got in touch with Face For Business as the UK was preparing for its first lockdown.

Like many businesses, particularly those in the media, they had already seen a major change coming in the way they’d need to work and had already tried to take steps to prepare.

They moved their phone system to an Intelligent Virtual Agent (IVA) which should have automatically diverted their calls to an online portal so they could continue to use the phone from the studio, as well as connect to their hosts working remotely.

But after a few weeks it was becoming evident that the system was ‘hit and miss’ as Mathew Rickard, Sales Manager at Pure West Radio described it.

It was only through a chance conversation with one of their existing partners, a fast-track driving school, that they heard about Face For Business and got in touch.

Creating a reliable, consistent phone system for remote radio stations

“We muddled through on and off with the IVA system and at the time there wasn’t a huge amount of traffic but we were noticing calls being missed,” said Mathew.

“Some days we’d have 4-5 calls but there’d be a huge gap between the call coming in and the messages getting to us, so it wasn’t working for us.”

As a radio station, answering the phone is an essential part of picking up news tips from the public, as well as keeping in touch with local commercial partners and sponsors.

After speaking with Face for Business, they decided to take advantage of our free trial and we set them up with a team of remote assistants, spent time with them learning what calls we’d be taking and how they wanted their calls diverted.

“We had a lot of questions to ask and they were very patient with us,” Mathew added.

“We had to explain a lot about ourselves so they understood how we handled calls and what we expected.

“But the onboarding was really simple and they really listened to feedback we had on the calls. I think there was only one occasion we had a call we weren’t happy about but that was just the way the message had been translated and it was resolved quickly.”

The result

“It was clear from the data that nine out of the 10 calls FFB dealt with for us would have been missed, so it’s great knowing we’ve got that security behind us and calls will be answered even when we’re out of the studio.

“With remote working also we’ve managed to bring home studios in for all of our presenters, so to have that permanent solution in place with our phone system that we know calls are going to be answered whether we’ve got someone in the studio or not is great.

“Plus, because we get a lot of calls between 6-9pm from members of the public, it’s meant we’ve been able to extend that call answering period where we can have presenters in their home studios or out and we know the studio phone is manned.

“On the money side too, it’s costing us about £60 to £70 a month for the call answering, but if we had to employ someone to answer the phones it would be a lot more than that.”

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