Tiny telco prides itself on its customized solutions and customer service

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This article was published 31/12/2020 (2085 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

When it comes to landline telephone service in Manitoba, most of us believe there is an oligopoly and that we have no choice but to deal with Bell MTS, Shaw and Telus.

But there are other options.

Provincial Tel, which started in Winnipeg in 2006, is one of a handful of local do-it-yourself telcos that have built their own networks and work hard to carve out a little bit of business for themselves.

One way Provincial Tel founders Surinder Pal Singh and Russell Ochocki have found their business is by customizing service offerings.

With a customer base that now numbers 300 — mostly small businesses as opposed to residential — its broadband connected telephony services is now available in 160 communities in the province with co-location infrastructure with Bell MTS in both Winnipeg and Brandon.

“It is all our own network co-located inside MTS,” said co-founder Singh. “They don’t like us very much. But that’s fine. Competition is good for the end consumer.”

As the COVID pandemic is wreaking havoc across the economic landscape, Provincial Tel has lost some of its customers even while word-of-mouth demand has been growing.

During this unusual economic dynamic it has also come up with some innovative service offerings that are right for the times.

Working with the Microsoft Team video collaboration platform, Provincial Tel has built a software integration that will allow users to use that MS Team platform as their own phone.

Their new integration, called Provincial Tel Cloud Voice, allows users to make and receive calls via Microsoft Team turning their desktop or laptop into a telephone, when necessary.

As a lean four-person operation, there is no budget for a splashy advertising roll-out, but already they have done a couple of installations including a small financial services company that wanted to do away with handsets for its staff.

The Cloud Voice service fits in to the kind of quirky service offering that Provincial Tel prides itself in. For instance, although it does not provide wireless mobile services, it can plant a second (or multiple) extra numbers on a cellphone without the need of a SIM card.

It can also plant a 204 area code on phone that does not enter the province of Manitoba.

“Every customer comes to us with a unique need… We listen to the customers’ needs and based on those needs and requirements we come up a solution for them to implement.”– Provincial Tel co-founder Surinder Pal Singh. 

They have some call centre clients that use that service as well as grandparents overseas who can call their family members in Winnipeg like a local call.

Singh and Ochocki say many of their customers are small business owners who are fed up, for whatever reason, in dealing with the big telcos.

“It’s not so much the technical service, but the customer service they are fed up with,” Ochocki said. “Surinder and I sit down and listen.”

It’s that philosophy — and the fact that it took them more than a couple of years to work their way through the regulatory forest with the CRTC to become a registered telco before they signed up their first customer — that allows them to work with clients who have been financially hard hit during the pandemic.

“Every customer comes to us with a unique need,” Singh said. “We are successful because we don’t just plant our packages down. We listen to the customers’ needs and based on those needs and requirements we come up with a solution for them to implement.”

martin.cash@freepress.mb.ca