When you're running one of the largest taxi firms in Britain's fourth largest city, you can't afford to leave your telecoms to chance.  That's the view of Steve Howard, MD of Wheels Private Hire, a Leeds based taxi firm with hundreds of vehicles on the road, day and night.

Wheels Private Hire have trusted their telecoms to Northern Telecom since 2013. It's a relationship built on trust and on knowing that Northern Telecom are there to support them 24/7, 365 days a year.  As Steve explains it "the team at Northern Telecom always go the extra mile to deliver what we need, whether that's ten in the morning, or ten at night".

Steve's favourite example of the Northern Telecom work ethic happened a couple of years ago, when the company decided to change dispatch system provider.  Steve explains "Dispatch systems are the beating heart of a taxi firm. They enable us to see our entire vehicle fleet at any one time, deploy taxis to customers and much more besides. They can also come with an integrated phone system from the same dispatch system supplier.  So we use Northern Telecom for services such as Leased Line connectivity and SIP Trunks (for our call traffic), and the dispatch system as the actual telephone system".

"Unfortunately, the switch to our new provider didn't go as planned and one busy Saturday night it simply wasn't working the way we needed it to.  We were losing tens of thousands of pounds worth of business every hour, and we were at our wits end."

"That's where Jon Graves and the team at Northern Telecom came into it. I contacted Jon to see if he had any suggestions that might help. Jon was actually at an Ed Sheeran concert with his family, but he was able to understand the problem straight away and come up with some suggested solutions, including directing call traffic back to the previous dispatch system provider's phone system and firing the old system back up".

"This kind of out of the box solution is what we've come to expect from Northern Telecom. Jon left the concert and by the time he arrived at our offices, he'd already spoken to our old dispatch system provider and made preparations to move back onto the old system. Jon had our phones and systems back up and working within 10 minutes of arriving at our offices. I can honestly say that the Northern Telecom team delivered something that night that no other telecom firm would have been able to do. Their understanding not just of telecom firms, but our sector is second to none".