The Kent based farm, run by Peter Webb sells organic produce including fruit, lamb and fleece to shops, restaurants and individual customers throughout the UK. It also rents out barns on the land as office space, to local businesses including Tatty Bumpkin, the Yoga business for babies and children which appeared on Dragon’s Den and is run by Sam Pepper.
With a limited number of voice and data lines running into the farm most of which were already in use, it was looking like the only option was to invest in laying down new lines into the premises to provide the corporate telephony services to its business tenants including Tatty Bumpkin. “Digging up the land to install new lines is an expensive exercise and something we were desperately trying to avoid,” explains Peter. “It’s a common issue for farms in remote locations. We are all trying to diversify our businesses and to do this we have to overcome technical difficulties as farms are often located at the end of cables and telephone wires which make it difficult to upgrade.”
Following a recommendation from Peter’s son Daniel, Foehn was selected thanks to the team’s technical expertise. “I was impressed with their can-do attitude to what we were previously told would be technical barriers to what we wanted to do”
Foehn’s solution made use of SIP trunks across the restricted connections available in order to provide a range of special features including voicemail, internal extensions and unlimited direct dial numbers. Allen’s farm has its own telephony which it uses for taking orders and payments of its produce and can now offer corporate telephony services to its two business tenants whilst avoiding having to pay for the laying down of extra physical infrastructure.
”We’ve been hurt in the past with bigger suppliers and decided to put our faith in Foehn and their expertise with great results,” Peter continued. “Because it’s hosted, we didn’t have to worry about installing costly new lines and services which was a huge relief. Perhaps the best thing about hosted telephony is if we want to do something with the system like add new features, we can turn to Foehn to give us the answer and don’t have to work it out for ourselves.”