It was not just reputation that was being lost. It was costing a lot of money in salaries as well as the required overtime to fix the problem. Then there were the discounts it was giving to compensate and pacify customers.

"It was ridiculous. We were giving out thousands of dollars of discounts a week because they were unhappy. We were even sending out flowers to people to compensate. It was all based around the fact the communication wasn't happening."

Accent spent a year trying to make the Samsung system work, but to no avail.

Dawes said his interest was piqued when Avaya came out with an SME version of its Avaya IP Office. With little hesitation, the old system was gone and in September last year came the new phone system

"By the time we got it in, in the very first month we saw the problems we had almost disappear overnight."