The extraordinary evolution of vControl

When discussing telecommunications, you would be hard pressed to find someone who can’t instantly recall cases of unhelpful customer service, large expenses and service disruptions.

Australians when faced with a problem that requires contacting their telecommunications provider will automatically expect the worst. Long call wait times, automated attempts at troubleshooting, low level support that takes them through a script with no real understanding of the problem, escalation to another team, who take days to address the issue.

The pandemic stress-tested the telecommunications industry. Networks became overwhelmed with the exploding demand caused by the increase in work-from-home traffic. Telcos let people down and were lambasted for delivering even worse customer service.

Not vControl. Their scalable and flexible design was able to shine, easily accommodating the growth and provided a flawless customer experience.

In the years prior, they had constructed a robust business and unique experience of the telecommunications industry that genuinely – and pleasantly – surprised anyone interacting with the business for the first time.

vControl is now one of Australia’s leading VoIP platforms.

The founders and owners of vControl are Ben Merton and Sverre Gunnersen. They were just a couple of young school lads in 1997 when they decided to participate in the ‘Young Achievers Australia’ program to offer web design to local businesses.

As young IT technicians and after graduating from high school in 1999, Ben and Sverre both opened IT businesses. They were often sharing staff, ideas and customers, so they decided to merge their knowledge into one company.

They went looking for a telecommunications solution for their new business. They found a stream of services designed for the large corporate sector. Those available for smaller business were restrictive, expensive, and simply had no room for customisation.

This gave them an idea. As tech enthusiasts with brilliant coding abilities, why not design a phone system for themselves? At the time, VoIP was gaining momentum.

Ben and Sverre created a simplistic VoIP hosted PBX phone system that suited their own business and gave them the freedom and flexibility to make any changes and add any features they needed.  

The light bulb moment happened when their own IT clients started asking for help in the same area. They realised they had an opportunity to create a telecommunication company that solved the pain points for SMEs.

In 2008 they launched vControl’s hosted PBX VoIP phone system to the SME market.

To improve their service offering, they invested more time and money into further developing their hosted PBX framework and growing the team with additional developers and technicians.  

As the consumer base grew, they were exposed to even more customers needing unusual features and custom styled setups. To maximise the usefulness of the platform, they decided that all future systems development would be customer driven.  

By developing customer requested features in such a way that all customers would be able to immediately make use of the improvements, the platform rapidly grew to become a one-stop shop for any sized businesses with telecommunications needs. 

Part of the vControl vison was to simplify the complexity of telecommunications by removing and eliminating the requirement for third party involvement in an SME’s telecommunications setup and call flow decision-making process.    

By offering an easy-to-use, self-management telecommunications platform, any business could control their phone service actions and choose to add or remove features instantly at the click of button.  

vControl built a full suite of corporate features like voicemail to email, menus, queues, click and connect hardware, ease of mobility, voice/text/video, a single platform to manage everything, excellence in HD call quality, flexible and scalable phone system options, cost effective pricing, multi-site/multi-device/multi-level systems, customised integrations such as Microsoft Teams connectivity, built in SMS inbound and outbound features – just to name a few.

After several years developing and refining the new infrastructure and processes, they proved its effectiveness.

Businesses could now painlessly use telecommunications as a powerful tool to aid their business growth. Each of the main issues around cost, reliability, functionality and service in the telecommunications sector was a thing of the past.

Solving these issues was the reason the business came to be in the first place. vControl has undoubtedly shaped a more positive impression of the telecommunications industry in Australia.