On 22nd December, staff at De Gelsey House held a festive lunch, with everyone contributing some lovely food and drinks. Certainly no chance of anyone leaving hungry that day! We also gave our thanks to Santa for keeping up with his tradition and distributing the Secret Santa presents.
A raffle was also held with funds being raised for the Avante Charitable Fund. Emma Key, Marie Carter and Jon Green were the 3 lucky winners who went home with an IPad mini each, donated by NSN. Congratulations to the winners and all those who won all the other raffle prizes.
Further funds were raised through the Home Care and Support Santa Challenge. The lucky winner was Tracy James (pictured bottom right) who received a money prize, with half going towards the Charitable fund.
Every year staff are invited to buy a bauble, write a Christmas wish to fellow colleagues, nominate a Charity and hang on the tree. The baubles are all placed in a pot and the nominated Charity on the winning bauble receives the proceeds raised.
Julian’s winning bauble was picked out at random, his nominated Charity being the June Oliver Brighter Future Fund at Great Ormond Street Hospital receiving the raised funds. Their response and thanks for the donation can be found on the opposite page.
And finally … the very worthy winner of the best Christmas outfit was our very own Bah Humbug, Frances Lake (pictured bottom left).
It only seems like yesterday that we were bringing our first customers on board but NSN is celebrating its 6th Birthday this month.
We are now a mature business in excellent financial health with an awesome depth of capability within our community of employees and partners. We have been successfully trading now for 6 years and have recently achieved an annual turnover of £6 Million, with organic growth still coming steadily. Our churn rate is exceptionally low and our take up of additional products and services within our growing customer base is very high.
We have a very loyal community of customers and business partners. We work hard to make sure that we listen to them and incorporate their feedback into everything we are doing both now and in the future.
We are planning for future success, and our vision is taking us to some exciting new levels of excellence in terms of customer experience and the breadth of products and services in which we can offer a deep level of technical capability.
Our commitment has always been to be connecting you now, and we are delighted to say that our delivery is only growing in strength. Thank you all for your support to date.
Wishing you all a very Happy Christmas and a Prosperous New Year in 2017 from all of us at NSN!!
An open letter from Sharleen Bothma:
Dear iPBX – Cloud Telephony Customer
I trust you are enjoying the use of your NSN iPbx Hosted Telephony Solution.
Looking at technical data we notice that our customers are not utilising all the iPBX platform has to offer, listed below are a few great additions to the system that may be of interest to you.
Voicemail To Email
If you are away from your desk and someone leaves a voice mail on your phone, this can be delivered to you via an email attachment on your mobile device allowing you to listen back to the message whilst away from your desk
Phone Buddy
A little application that runs on your PC, look up contacts, click to dial and get instant access to your call history
Call Recording
Does your company need to record calls? Would your business benefit from recording your calls for training purposes? For a small incremental monthly charge, we can switch on the function to record your calls in and out of the business.
iPBX For Mobile
Easily add an iPBx extension onto your mobile phone, become part of your system when out of the office or abroad.
Auto Attendant and Call Queuing
Are you dealing with multiple inbound calls? Would you like your inbound calls handled more effectively? We can set you up with an Auto Attendant I.e. Welcome to NSN, Press 1 for support, 2 for sales, etc. Call queuing means that we hold your calls in the cloud and deliver them to available handsets as they become free.
Headsets
We have a huge range of compatible headsets for our phones, wired and wireless options to increase productivity for heavy phones users.
Conference units and iPBX conference numbers
We have units available for all budgets, no more frustrating conference calls off a desk phone with multiple people trying to speak in a meeting room.
An iPBX conference number means any of your iPBX phones call into the bridge for free, local call rate for any external users dialling into your unique number (In many cases these calls are now free too).
Wallboards
Easily monitor and manage call data from any location, display on monitors in your office.
Live demo of wallboards click here.
Training requirements and System issues
If you have any training requirements or have any ongoing issues that you would like us to look into please click this link and log a ticket, a member of our operations team will contact you right back.
Over the last 18 years of living in London I have watched people crossing the bridges across the Thames or shuffling into, through and out of tube stations in the mornings.
If you take the time it is impossible not to notice the way many people not only drag their brief cases and laptop bags with them, they seem to drag their bodies along too. It’s like watching a bad B movie called ‘The day of the Zombie Executive’. People have picked up the habit of living in their heads and forcing their bodies to comply, treating their physical selves like their car; you drive it like an extension of yourself, have it serviced occasionally but have absolutely no idea how it works let alone have a clue how to maintain it or fix it.
The main reason for this is virtually nothing most business people are required to do on a daily basis asks very much of the body – we even avoid stairs in favour of escalators and lifts. We spend most of our days sitting down, using mostly our finger tips to make a living. Utterly disconnected from the vital yet silent majority of ourselves. The sad fact is that most people only hear what the body has to say when they take a holiday and then it’s quite common for it to tell you how badly you have ignored it and how unhappy it is. Before I took up Aikido just over six years ago I had been doing the sporadic gym session here and there and some running in the mornings. I even took lessons in the Alexander Technique to try and get my body to behave how I wanted it to
All of those things were fine but they didn’t have a purpose, discipline or a set of benchmarks to be tested against. Mostly they just perpetuated the problem of treating the body like a rented car and not a valued loved one and the only home most of us will ever own mortgage free. I would of course experience periods of improvement, better wellbeing etc but then always a slip back into being a business-mind dragging a body around with me. Gravity consistently winning the battle until, at the end of each day, I would crumple into bed and have less than enough sleep to face another day without my body fully on my side.
Six years later I found myself in Japan doing an intensive 16 day training program with a possible black belt grading ahead of me. I had to maintain my body and fix it in order to make it to the next days’ training sessions, let alone those scheduled for the following week. After about four days I found myself moving with my body and not ‘dragging’ it. My body started to regularly give me more than I could have asked for. It got me up in the morning and told me what it needed in order to be sustained, really clearly. It prompted me to stretch and to practice when not in the dojo. I found it easier to manage more than one thing at a time in my life than ever before, as I did not experience a conflict or dissonance between them.
I also just stopped focusing on a bunch of stuff that isn’t really important, like what people might be thinking about me. Believe it or not I actually took up Aikido to get this from it and had seen glimmers of it along the way. Do I think you have to take up a martial art for 6 years then travel to the other side of the planet to immerse yourself in a full time training program and be tested at the end in order to get this? Essentially no. I have however learned some things that I strongly advocate – here are 5 of them that I think could be very helpful if this article has connected with you.
- Take up a practice in a martial art or some kind of physical endeavour that requires you to use both your mind and your body, and that can be pursued weekly over the course of your life; even into old age.
- Choose an activity that has both a program of measuring your development by an instructor but also agree with yourself why you are doing it and have one of those reasons to become a better person (I.e. fewer of your decisions are influence by fear).
- Check in with yourself regularly and contrast how your relationship with your body is changing and if your relationships with others are being affected in any way, good or bad.
- When you experience positive changes along the way look at how they can be of benefit to others and spend time applying what you are learning in the working and home environments. This can serve to further integrate developments in the body and yourself as a whole in the training space and with who you are becoming in other areas of your life.
- Enjoy the new developments and insights when they come whilst also taking the plateaus as a reassuring investment into the quality of your future life and the lives of those closest to you. This kind of ongoing personal development cannot fail to improve the quality of your own life without having positive effects on everyone around you.
By Mark Shraga, M.A.
Chief Executive Officer at New Star Networks (NSN)
Recently I was invited by our Bank, Barclays to attend a track day at Silverstone.
As I finally embraced zooming around Silverstone in the iconic Porsche 911 I felt a little frustrated about the time it was taking me to grasp moving up into a higher level car, I needed to trust the car and embrace the change. Had I done this earlier I would have had more fun instead of feeling nervous throughout the first part of the session.
This reminded very much of the recent gear shift in my role here at NSN. In the past 2 months I completed the process of moving fully from Business Development Manager to Channel Director culminating in being made a full articled Director of New Star Networks (NSN). This change is now sinking in and I am learning to trust my knowledge, embrace change and really enjoy my role. The company is being driven forward at a great pace and I am really excited about how far we can go. I warmly invite you to come along for the ride!
Recent instabilities across multiple networks including British Telecom have prompted our solutions architects to develop NSN Ultra.
This new product will deliver levels of resilience previously mostly in the domain of large enterprises at an affordable rate for the SME market place. “We are really proud to be delivering to our customers a solid upgrade to their current internet connectivity. We are deliberately making this an affordable option to ensure that all of our customers can benefit from our suite of cloud based telephony products and solutions.” Says Nick Shraga, Managing Director at NSN.
Find out more
NSN are delighted to have been awarded Reseller Sales Team of the Year 2016 (£2.5M/5M). The competition was very strong with 6 other market leaders in our category alone.
We owe our success to a combination of strong loyalty to the NSN brand amongst our channel partners and the dilligence of our Sales & Operations Teams in delivering on our Partners promises to our customers.
says NSN’s Managing Director Nick Shraga.
