Co-founders Damian Hanson and David Hague have launched CircleLoop, a smart online phone system that aims to bring new thinking to the聽telecoms industry.
Having set up shop in Manchester’s The Sharp Project, CircleLoop is designed to help teams聽save time and money聽by eliminating the need for expensive desk phones, line rentals and long-term contracts.
Instead, businesses can consolidate their mobile and landline numbers into CircleLoop and use it on their existing devices including computers and mobile phones.
The team are also the brains behind retail tech specialist One iota, annd have launched CircleLoop to provide a simple solution to the business telephony issues encountered by many small businesses, namely聽lack of flexibility, high costs and constant complexities.
鈥淲e are very excited to launch CircleLoop to the market,鈥� says Hanson.
鈥淲e feel that start-ups and small business owners are either totally ignored or presented with poor experiences from telecoms vendors who make millions of pounds from their old-school approaches.
鈥淲e believed that there must be a better way, so we developed CircleLoop to be the kind of simple telephony service that businesses would actually want to use.
鈥淲e鈥檝e made something that is instant and gives users control without the usual headaches and confusing jargon we鈥檝e all just learned to live with.鈥�
The strategy has already been welcomed by local SMEs. CircleLoop launched in beta in November 2016 and the system already has almost 1,000 users with other North West businesses jumping on board, including Dream Agility, Wakelet, Twine and Digital Gurus.
鈥淎s a small business ourselves, we recognise all the pain points and obstacles faced by SMEs who crave simplicity and efficiency,鈥� says Hague.
鈥淲hilst we are just getting started with our vision for CircleLoop we believe we have already developed something which will be welcomed in the market and we look forward to working closely with our valued customers to make CircleLoop a next generation telco.鈥�
Dialling into the city鈥檚 thriving technology and start-up scene the company is making strong contributions to the region as an official Northern Powerhouse partner and regularly supports Tech North initiatives.
According to an OFCOM report there are over 7.6m fixed business landlines in the UK in a market worth over 拢2.1bn. The move to cloud-based telephony is set to accelerate over the coming聽five years as a result of BT announcing it will no longer sell non-IP based connections from 2020.