Listers....20 years at the top

"For over 20 years, Lister Unified Communications has been providing communications services to many businesses initially in Gloucestershire, the Southwest & Midlands and latterly throughout the UK and we have hardly had a chance to take a breath, with the continued change and transformation in the way we communicate.

The company has come a long way since our start in 2001 with three staff alongside my brother Tom Lister and fellow director, Jim Clapham. From ‘analogue lines and big old Nokia bricks’ to a world of cloud and IP with phone calls via the internet and smartphones and often by video, it’s been incredible. Who would have imagined back then the mobile phone would become the centrepiece of your whole life?

Today our experienced team provide and support a full range of Unified Communications products and services that include cutting-edge IT, mobile and office communications systems to businesses of all shapes and sizes.

Change has accelerated in the last few years, largely on the back of better broadband. The better it is, the more services can become located in the cloud and the more flexibility for how and where you want to work. The recent times we’ve gone through have had a dramatic impact on the way we work and where we work. Many of our customers initially needed options to work from home and today still want to retain that flexibility. But now want to figure out how to get the best out of staff, in terms of team working, activity levels, customer service and performance. We are now helping businesses move onto the next stages, such as intelligent routing of calls to the right person, higher visibility and real-time analytics.

The rise of video-led technology has been extraordinary, and who would have thought how comfortable we would become over a number of different platforms? As we all have got better at this, more and more sales pitches and presentations are being done without the travel, more projects are being collaborated on with content sharing over the desktop, instead of all attending the same office, contracts being signed electronically, the list goes on.

To complement this, we now take it for granted that we can get our IT anywhere we want and on any device. On-site servers and storage have quickly become dated, as we appreciate the productivity, security and reliability gains of cloud and consume more and more applications, such as Office 365, Accounting and CRM, alongside our daily interests, such as music, TV, photos, banking and social media.

We have been banging the drum now for a long time about the need to get the best internet connectivity available that you can afford and is available in your area. Don’t skimp on this! Look to review it regularly. We continue to consume more and more data and bandwidth, as we accelerate our cloud usage, and this is just so important to making it all work properly for you.  

Our wish is that Lister Unified Communications will be your go-to provider of all your communications needs including Cloud Telephony,  Mobiles, Internet connectivity, IT services, SIP, Multi-net SIMS and more.’’

Rob Lister