Company history
Leadline Services Ltd was incorporated on 7 November 1996, and the company started trading on 1 February 1997.
Leadline was set up by Clare Cross as a home based telemarketing business. In November 1997, Leadline moved to their first premises in Worcester city centre. Telemarketing was still the core activity at that time. However, in calling local companies it was obvious that a lot of businesses were reliant on answer machines. Then Leadline started to make its first steps into telephone answering.
In April 1998 Leadline acquired a small local business called Worcester secretarial services that had a few telephone answering clients. The decision was made to invest in ISDN30 and Leadline's first digital telephone system. Steady growth followed and telephone answering services became the core business.
In December 2000 Leadline moved into its current premises. This was followed by a period of rapid growth mainly because of a concentration in the mail order sector. Then in May 2005 a huge strategy decision was made that changed the company direction.
Mail order clients, having developed their websiites, wanted their customers to order online and reduce their reliance on outsourced call centres. Alongside this, employing 40 people was not exactly rewarding, and there were more exciting developments taking place with IVR (interactive voice response). So Leadline made the decision to grow, not to grow with people based services but to grow with technologically based services.
The company started to split into two distinct areas - one area offering telephone answering and telemarketing services and the other area offering IVR.
In March 2010, the telephone answering and telemarketing side of the business was merged with the Virtual Business Centre based in Brinkworth just south of Swindon. The IVR side of the business was formed into a new company called Chatterbox IVR Ltd.
Leadline continues with its own people, name, brand and identity, and offers its existing and future clients call handling 7 days a week with highly trained operators and call centre technology that seamlessly pulls the operations together.
