First Tel: Centralize Platform for Unified Communications

“Show value, create an experience, and always strive to exceed customers’ expectations.” This adage by American author ShepHyken aptly delineates the work portfolio of Singapore based firm First Tel, which has built a reputation for delivering excellent customer service across industries with regards to unified communications. The company prides itself on its prompt responses to customer challenges that help in reducing the customer churn rate being a full service enterprise IT service provider. “Our uniqueness to instrument the customer demands has listed us as SingTel’s top Titanium partner for the past eight years,” says Maggie Chua, CEO of First Tel.

Headquartered in Singapore, the firm renders a centralized platform for managing Telco data, and voice connectivity to WAN / LAN networking, server infrastructure, and IP Telephony. This one-stop platform helps the client to mitigate the integration issues when multiple vendors are involved in a project.

With a competent team of engineers with Cisco, Microsoft, Shoretel, VMWare, and CISSP Security certifications, First Tel develops solutions that serve clients across industries. First Tel’s offerings include telco services, IT infrastructure, maintenance services, IT monitoring, IP telephony & unified communications, managed network, load balancers, cloud services, business continuity, IT security, and software licensing. Moreover, this tech agnostic company also invests highly in the training program of the employees to improve customer engagement and the employee retention graph. According to Maggie, the team is also entitled to decision-making responsibilities that serve the clients in designing and implementing their specific requirements. “Recruiting the right team members is the first step. We take great lengths and pains to recruit and sieve out only those with passion and dedication for excellence,” attributes Maggie.

The dovetailed solutions serve in the areas of the contact center, and in integration with enterprise data or real-time networks in a very cost efficient manner. The firm also carries the Unified Communications systems of several market leaders such as Avaya, Cisco, Panasonic, and Shoretel to upvote their experience.

The company with over a decade of experience in delivering unified communication services provides connectivity solutions to optimize the existing legacy infrastructure of its clients. First Tel’s wide array of connectivity solutions includes international leased circuits, international MPLS, premium Metro Ethernet, and broadband internet. These offerings can be supplemented with WAN optimization / WAN load balancers for higher performance and resilience.

Since its inception, First Tel has constantly enhanced its skills to be competitive and deliver high-quality innovative data, and voice and IP network services to its large customer base throughout in Singapore and the Asia-Pacific region. Referring to one its clients, Maggie illustrates how First Tel assisted a Singapore based manufacturing company to virtualize and inter-connect its legacy data network and voice infrastructure in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam. The firm built a private SD-WAN network for the manufacturing company that assisted them in voice and data connectivity across IPSec tunnels. In another project, the company assisted in contact center implementation for a government organization providing hotline support. The challenge here was that the customer required an immediate service as they were targeting to roll out within a month. “With First Tel’s depth and breadth in Unified Communications project management and implementation checklist and user training, we helped the government organization to meet their rollout targets within the deadline,” adds Maggie.

The key differentiator of the firm lies in the fact that it architects solutions according to the clients’ urgency and budgets. For successful implementation of the customized solution, First Tel gets involves in a routine engagement program with the client through email and instant messaging. The firm also works closely with Telco to understand the crux of integrating with legacy CO Trunks, ISDN, or SIP.

In the coming years, First Tel envisions leveraging several front end technology such as IoT and AI, and also expand its offerings in the info-security field to mitigate the proliferation of increasing sophisticated malware and zero-day attacks. On the geographical front, First Tel will be expanding its territory in Cambodia, Malaysia, Indonesia, India, Philippines, and Thailand.