Sheikh (pictured above, centre) highlighted the difficulties Gamma and other CPs face in the absence of either a national government-led campaign or a wide-reaching Openreach advertising campaign.
She said, “As a CP, one of the issues we have is: it is very hard to do a campaign out to end-customers because often we are not dealing with end-customers directly. Gamma is quite hidden, we sit behind the scenes, and CPs don’t always have a direct relationship with the end-customer.
“And, even if a CP does have that direct relationship, it’s really hard to have a communication message that doesn’t end up sounding like a hard sell. Having a national campaign would add to our message and give us legitimacy.”
Sheikh explained she understood Openreach’s hesitancy to commence a national campaign at this stage, with legitimate reasons why that might not be the best course of action. Some CPs, for example, are concerned about attracting a large and unmanageable volume of customer queries.
But she concluded, “It is complicated, there are quite a few changes going on and it’s confusing. Having a consistent story out to end customers would be a difficult story to tell – but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t tell it. When you have such a big change, one of the most important things you need to get right is communication. The communication needs to be clear and it needs to be consistent.
“At the moment, my sentiment is: communication is happening, but it’s happening all over the place in different ways. There’s not a level of consistency and that’s why you’re getting these pockets of people who are just not aware of what is coming.”
Sheikh was speaking as part of a panel on the move to all-IP at FCS Comex 2023. The other participants were James Lilley, director for all-IP, Openreach, Martin White, product manager, voice services, Giacom, David Halliday, from the office of telecommunications adjudicator, and Chris Pateman, consultant editor, Comms Business.
Gamma has partnered with Aardman to develop a campaign with Morph that explains the upcoming switch from landline phones to digital systems. The company is also a National Champion for Fit To Switch, a Comms Business supplier-agnostic campaign that directly targets businesses across the UK to raise awareness of the need to speak to their CP for professional advice and expert consultancy ahead of the switch-off.
Pateman, from Comms Business, emphasised why the Fit To Switch campaign can help. He said, “British business is still woefully ignorant. And one of the reasons is that, whilst within this room we might be comfortable with what’s happening, most businesses haven’t got a scooby about the telecommunications infrastructure they’re using. They probably think about it slightly less than they do about the water or the electricity they are using. They think about it as a utility.
“They may well have looked very closely at things like the switchboard during Covid. Many businesses at that time simply would have gone bust if we hadn’t of provisioned excellent good-quality all-IP frontends for them so we could hunt incoming calls and forward them to mobile phones for remote workers. That isn’t the problem. The problem is: sitting in a cupboard somewhere is a little automatic dialer that is still hardwired into that copper network.
“Very often, this isn’t perceived as part of the comms estate. It’s just something a third-party provides and as far as businesses are concerned it is quite invisible. And they haven’t had to think about it. Even in a power-cut it kept on working.
“Now it won’t, and we need to know how many of them there are and how to reach them. And it’s really hard for comms providers to raise awareness on their own – at least without businesses thinking they’re trying to flog them something. Fit To Switch will talk directly to those businesses to raise that awareness.”