The desk phone continues to be a core part of many organizations. However, the demise of certain older PBX companies (Nortel), and the financial state of some current players, like Avaya, has brought the long-term viability of these systems into question. While some companies have decided to keep an unsupported platform for their telephone system and use either internal or external solutions to keep it running, for others this is not an option.
In hospitals, communications systems are a life or death concern
In the healthcare sphere, communications are more than just the phones; it is a critical part of delivering the care that facilities and organizations are chartered to do. In fact, communications failures are a large contributor to adverse clinical events and outcomes. In a retrospective review of 14,000 in-hospital deaths, communications errors were found to be the leading cause, twice as frequent as errors due to inadequate clinical skill. Communications systems are critical for healthcare operations and are one of the factors that are tracked in the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), part of the US Health and Human Services (HHS). For example, in the Medicare Contractor Beneficiary and Provider Communications Manual, systems are to be available 24/7 and not to return “soft busies”.
A communications failure can lead to decertification
In fact, a communications failure and the impact on a facility can be part of a CMS audit. If the system is not in current support, it can result in action leading to decertification. For healthcare facilities, CMS decertification can be disastrous whether it’s the cost of bringing the communications system back up to code and recertifying, the loss in business continuity, the impact on reputation or the sheer cost of losing revenue from CMS-based programs.
For healthcare facilities with systems from vendors that have either ceased to function or are in financial difficulties, this presents a significant issue. For example, Avaya has announced that support for its CS1000 PBX may be terminating in 2017. While this may be limited to the CS1000M models, the current Avaya bankruptcy and the uncertainty about the ongoing business are clear indicators that healthcare facilities with these systems need to begin thinking about their long-term future.
Learn about healthcare communications solutions >
How to replace the CS1000 platform
One readily available alternative to the CS1000 is the wide variety of Mitel communications platforms designed for healthcare facilities of all sizes. With Mitel’s ability to integrate easily with established systems, healthcare institutions can migrate with minimal impact and reasonable cost. HealthEast Care System, a healthcare organization with four hospitals, 14 clinics, homecare services and a medical transportation center, recently decided that its older Avaya system and service was no longer meeting its needs. After an exhaustive search, HealthEast narrowed down its options to continuing with Avaya or choosing a new communications system from Cisco or Mitel. In the end, Mitel’s total cost of ownership was less than half of Avaya’s or Cisco’s. Mitel’s offering presented a simpler architecture and the ability to integrate with HealthEast’s electronic healthcare record system, Epic. With the time and money it will save through ease of migration, HealthEast chose Mitel’s platform as the best path forward.
Whatever you do, do it soon
Clearly, time is running out on these older systems, and both for the good of the patient population and the ongoing business of the facilities themselves, considering alternatives is important. Mitel is an option that should be considered in the overall migration planning exercise.
Continue on your path towards future growth with your current communication system.
You have questions, we have answers.
Connect with a Toshiba transition expert today.
info@townerkc.com | 913-780-3166
Transition to Mitel Seamlessly
Change can be challenging for businesses. This is why Mitel is committed to ensuring our customers get the support and service they need during this period of transition. Our customers are our number one priority and we want to help you connect with a Toshiba transition expert anytime, anywhere. To help, we’ve created an FAQ to answer any questions you might have.
Choose a Better Path Forward
When you take your next steps, you need to be sure it is the right path so you don’t end up back where you started. That means working with a vendor that has a reputation for high performance and stability to ensure your business is supported today and in the future, no matter how your needs change and grow. With feature-rich and mobile-first solutions to support your communications from end to end, Mitel is the only brand in five Gartner Magic Quadrant reports for business communications.
Find your best path with Mitel
Find a business communications system that fits your unique needs whenever, wherever. When Michael Johnson Performance’s Nortel system was left unsupported, the team quickly realized that, in order to stay competitive, they had to re-evaluate their needs and choose a system they could depend on.
“As we began looking for a partner to support our business needs, we didn’t really know what was out there. When we actually began to research the capabilities that Mitel could provide us, we were blown away.” – Michael Johnson Performance
Common Customer Questions
How will Mitel’s purchase of Toshiba impact me and the company I serve? This purchase may provide continuity with added product and service offerings that will go beyond the publicly stated May 22 ‘last order’ date.
Are my current contracts with Toshiba still valid?
Yes, contracts will remain valid. Mitel will be responsible for fulfilling all contracts immediately following the closing of the deal.
Will my warranties still be in effect? Yes. Mitel will be prepared to accept extended warranties.
Will any service quality/policies change? No. Mitel is as committed as Toshiba in delivering quality products and services to our partners and customers.
Will Toshiba inventory levels remain the same? Inventory levels fluctuate with all businesses; however, we are confident we can ensure continuity of supply.
Will quotes I received on Toshiba solutions still be honored? Yes, if they are backed by Toshiba or an accredited partner.
Will there be any staffing changes or facilities closures that might affect me? The Toshiba US business was planning to downsize & move from the existing Irvine facility. A plan to find an appropriate local office for the Mitel & former Toshiba teams is in process.
What new services, products or features will I be able to get through Mitel that I could not get through Toshiba? We will provide a detailed list to all customers, Partners, National Accounts with our Cloud, hybrid, and premise offerings in our roadmap update.
Unified Collaboration Etiquette and How to Improve It
In this audio interview, Daryl Reva speaks with ITinCanadaOnline’s Nestor Arellana about unified collaboration etiquette and the rules employees should follow to respect a coworker’s presence.
Audio Transcript
Nestor Arellana / IT in Canada Online: Over the last few years, enterprise collaboration apps and video conferencing apps have been skyrocketing in use in almost any sector. However, there still remain a few challenges for the people who use them, especially in the area of etiquette rules and best practices about how to use these tools. Today we have Daryl Reva, who is Vice President of Cloud Services for Mitel, and with his long experience in the use of collaboration and conferencing tools, he’s here to provide us with some tips and tricks on how to better use the tools we have in our offices these days.
Arellana: Hello Daryl.
Daryl Reva / Mitel: Hi, it’s good to be here. Looking forward to the conversation.
Arellana: Well, right now, we’re both on audio conferencing tool that we’re using and perhaps it’s very apt that we should discuss what are the best ways to use this. Sometimes there’s some etiquette that needs to be applied to these modern technologies.
Reva: Yeah, absolutely. I think if you take a step back and maybe take a macro view, there’s really a couple of pressing larger pillars that are helping to drive this. Number one is 2017: welcome to the year of instant gratification, and really this is driven by everything from access to technology to the use of the smartphone in our hands. It’s quite an interesting time where our consumer technology is helping to drive new business technology, which is quite the role reversal from the previous 10-20 years in the communications space.
Arellana: Mhm, Mitel is right in the middle of this. Care to talk about Mitel first before we launch into the tips and tricks?
Daryl Reva/Mitel: Yeah, absolutely. I’ve been with Mitel for a little over 15 months now and it is absolutely known as the powerhouse in the telephony marketplace. We’ve taken that heritage and lineage of technology and investment in R&D and have been able to move it into the cloud space in the early 2000s, and we like the self-proclaimed of ‘Godfather of the Cloud’.
So as you take a look at what we are able to do with our customers, what’s most important is that not only can we provide multiple deployment models that meet their needs, we can also ensure and future-proof their technology investment as they continue their own migration from premise to cloud at their own pace, something that not only works for their own organization but also works for their budget.
Arellana: Yes. So now that we have these terrific cloud-enabled applications that allow us to work together as a theme, true to cloud, video conferencing, teleconferencing tools that allow people from halfway across world to, to almost be together in the same room talking about their plans. There are still some challenges. Would you care to tell us some of the issues that people run into when using these, as you said, instant gratification tools?
Daryl Reva/Mitel: Yeah, absolutely. So I manage a team that is located all around the globe, everywhere from Sweden to Eastern and Western Europe as well. And the most important aspect of the communications that we have today is ensuring that we can not only increase employee productivity, but also challenge how quickly we can take product solutions ideas to market.
And the best way to really, to approach this always comes back to, ‘Well, how can we communicate? How can we as a team ensure that we have the right information in order to make the right decision?’
And so that comes back to ensuring that from a communications perspective, we are all very closely tied together—but more so in a fashion that is right for that user. And what I mean by that, you know, if you take a look at, you know going back to the etiquette. Some people on my team just prefer to transact via email. Others like to use our unified communications application, our team collaboration application called MiTeam. And what we have been able to do in an environment is actually reduce the amount of emails. Up to 44 percent of emails for a specific project can go by the wayside now because we have certain team collaboration applications that allow us to communicate much more effectively.
Arellana: Yes, very interesting point. And what does it mean to an organization, to a team, when you can cut down the amount of emails that are shuttling back and forth?
Daryl Reva/Mitel: Absolutely, I’ll give you a quick use case. We have a platform, an event called Mitel Next. And this event was happening earlier in the year in San Diego. And we were looking, we were on the verge of launching some new products and at the last minute we had an idea of bringing together a customer use case and showing demo examples of it, which drove our ability to set up an extension of our communications and our team really are the agencies and vendors that we work with.
So not only is it important to drive the communications within the organization, but we are also able to extend that productivity enhancement tool outside of the organization to our vendors, which allowed us to complete our task of delivering new videos and demos of these products just in time for our platform launch called Mitel Next.
Any other day, that project would have taken two to three times longer just due to the fact that you’re typically playing email tag or you’re playing voicemail tag. The opportunity to embed presence into a unified communications application, whether it’s your desktop or on your mobile device, it’s truly a game changer in employee and vendor productivity.
Arellana: Terrific point there. And when we’re using these technologies, it’s still communications, person-to-person communications, that has their sort-of basic principles that we have to follow. But then sometimes the communications gets bogged down, confusion arises, or even sometimes people get angry a lot of times when, when they’re emailing because it’s very hard to transmit the true feelings of a person when they’re using email or these tools because we’re not able to see the visual cues that we usually see when we’re talking to a person right in front of us. Would you care to share with us some of your seven tips and tricks for the average office worker and how to use these collaboration tools?
Daryl Reva/Mitel: Sure. Let me start by talking through kinda ‘chaos breeds opportunity.’ The fact that through text messaging we’re not able to really denote sarcasm built into the messaging. So an entire new form of communication was created called emojis. Texting paired with emojis, some of which are quite interesting, and maybe not reflective of productive communications, but nonetheless an entirely new language was created to assist in ways that both consumers and businesses alike may choose to interact.
And so some of those things that I want to talk through today really are based on the pillar and the platform of chaos breeds opportunity and which is why we have seen such a thrive of this unified communications applications in the work space.
So, you know, one of the things I would like to kind of start off with, is, if you think through an employee going on vacation, and you know, again, depending on the culture and maybe depending on the employee’s boss, there’s rules and regulations for respecting that employee’s space. And when it comes to communicating through applications – presence – and that’s the ability to detect whether or not somebody is available for either chat or conference or video conference, that, respecting someone’s presence is going to be of vital importance.
Because, like I said, if your, an employee is out on vacation, how many times would you try to connect with them and which means would you try to connect with them, or would you try to do it at all? And the same thing goes for your ability to track an employee down or a project down via the status or the presence of that employee.
So, for example, there is a lot of intuition that’s built into the Mitel applications, whether or not you’ve had a keystroke in a certain amount of time, whether or not your calendar integration shows that you’re currently in a meeting, whether or not you are currently on the phone. These are just a small example of a few types of integration that would set your presence to which we would, we would ask, or the general etiquette would ask, to respect their presence capabilities.
Arellana: I see. So, sort of the machine has a, the system has a way of, of judging whether you might be indisposed at the moment, you’re, you’re not in your in front of your desk, or not online—you’re probably on a vacation or probably you know you’re probably not working today so you know it would be up to the person who wants to contact you. You know, gives them a heads up, right?
Daryl Reva/Mitel: Yeah exactly. So if your application says that you are currently unavailable, what are the different means of communications that other people would go to? What’s the extent that they would go to try and reach you? Now that could be via email, that could be via phone call, and that phone call could then be, you know forwarded along to your mobile device, it could be a text message.
But at, at the heart of it, I think if people really begin to leverage and utilize the presence capabilities of these applications, more people would learn to respect them. So I think, out of the gate, that’s a really important foundation to build upon. If somebody has a ‘Do Not Disturb’ message in, as their presence, you know, respect that. Learn to understand that your emergency might not be somebody else’s emergency.
Arellana: I see. So respect each other’s presence or ability to be able to respond to your message at that instance that you’re thinking of sending it out.
Daryl Reva/Mitel: Yeah, absolutely. And I think if we kind of move on to the second phase of that it, it’s really understanding the culture. In a small business, if it’s all centrally located in an office, standing up and yelling over a cube might be a pretty disrespectful way to communicate with an employee. The same thing goes with immediately starting a video collab session, right?
It’s very intrusive, and so the ability to escalate communications, starting with the chat and moving through a phone call to a whiteboard session, to a collaboration session, to a video conference session— you know there’s certain steps that are more polite than sending over a video conference invite immediately to where the person might not be in the best disposition to accept that video call.
Arellana: Alright.
Daryl Reva/Mitel: And we’ve all heard stories, right? We’ve all heard stories of that one person that may be working from home that day and is not dressed suitable for the current presentation that they are giving.
Arellana: Yeah, we’ve seen the TV commercial of that. It’s an interesting point that you put forward, the use not only, of not only one communications tool, but several tools, and you’re introducing sort of a hierarchy of usage of these tools. Thanks a lot for joining our show today!
This article originally appeared on the IT in Canada Online podcast. You can listen to it here.
In this post, we’ll take a high‐level look at different factors driving the digital imperative in modern business and how it’s changing the nature of competition and market dynamics.
Recognizing digital business drivers
Digital business is the application of technology to build new operating models, processes, software and systems by leveraging the convergence of people, business and things.
These advances are creating new product and service opportunities as well as transforming business operations, helping companies generate more revenue, gaining greater competitive advantage and achieving higher efficiency.
Competitive advantage in this era of business is based on capturing new opportunities by rapidly adapting to changes in an organization’s market or industry. Those that can achieve this level of agility will leap-frog the competition, while those that can’t will struggle to survive. Thus, digitization – the process of becoming a digital business – needs to be at the top of every business and IT leader’s priority list.
Companies can no longer simply differentiate their products and services along a single dimension such as price, features, quality or support.
Maintaining and increasing competitive advantage in today’s dynamic, global economy is a major challenge for businesses in every industry. Companies can no longer simply differentiate their products and services along a single dimension such as price, features, quality, or support. Except for commodity goods and services, the lowest price doesn’t guarantee a sale, poor quality is never acceptable, and customer service requires far more than a friendly smile.
Instead, perceived value, functional match to requirements, exceptional quality, and total customer experience across all touch points are all important aspects of the new competitive norm.
Additionally, businesses must find innovative and creative new ways to engage, attract and retain their customers.
While it’s well understood that attracting a new customer costs dramatically more than keeping an existing one – as much as ten times more – it’s never been easier for customers to find, research, and move their business to your competitors.
And customers want to deal with businesses that not only provide the highest quality goods and services they need, when they need it, and at a price they’re willing to pay, but also that are socially responsible—with their employees, their partners and suppliers, their communities, and their environment.
In a time when costs are constantly being evaluated, inefficiency equals waste.
Inefficient business processes and toxic corporate cultures inevitably affect the bottom line (profits), but increasingly impact the top line (sales) as well. In a time when costs are constantly being evaluated, inefficiency equals waste—which no one wants to see or hear about. Everything you do as a business must stand up to public scrutiny. Customers don’t necessarily want to know how the sausage is made, but they also can’t look away from a train wreck.
Today, digitization has three primary drivers (sources from ZK Research).
Go digital or go home
Market leadership is no longer about having the best product, the lowest price, or even the best people. Becoming a market leader in any industry is now based on being able to capture new opportunities in a rapidly changing market.
This has always been true, but changes in market leadership used to take decades to occur. For example, in the 1980s, big box retailers completely redefined how retail organizations managed inventory. However, it took nearly two decades for their impact – not only to the retail industry but also the entire value chain – to be fully realized.
Becoming a market leader in any industry is now based on being able to capture new opportunities in a rapidly changing market.
Today, natively digital organizations are having a similar impact in fewer than five years. Figure 1‐2 shows that in 1960, businesses remained on the S&P 500 Index, on average, for 50 to 60 years; by the early 1980s, the average was less than 30 years. As this trend is likely to continue, by 2025, businesses can expect to remain on the index for an average of only 15 years, as new market leaders continually emerge.
How High-Performance Companies Tackle Digital Transformation
At Enterprise Connect, we learned some of the ways digital transformation has completely changed the way businesses should operate. But some businesses have adopted digital transformation far better than others. High-performance companies – that is, companies that have approached digital transformation as a tool to revolutionize their processes and grow market share – employ a few key strategies that any company can implement. No matter the size of your business, these four key strategies can mean the difference between becoming an industry leader and falling behind.
So what do high-performance companies have in common?
Embrace mobile excellence
Companies with a well-designed and -executed mobility strategy stay agile and responsive to how their work gets done, which means they stay efficient and productive in ways other companies can’t replicate. The news gets worse for businesses failing to adopt mobility as the new norm: the average cost of a bad or non-existent mobility strategy is $186,000 per week, putting them even further behind the companies getting it right. In short, high-performing companies know that work isn’t a destination: it’s an activity. Designing a workplace that moves with your employees ensures your company is equipped to go where business takes you and isn’t chained down by outdated infrastructure.
Foster team environments
There’s a reason 80% of executives say collaboration is crucial to growth. Better teamwork can result in better financial results, higher employee performance and, most importantly, higher levels of innovation. How do high-performance companies do it? A critical element of fostering a team environment involves providing the right tools to remove collaboration roadblocks and pave the way to higher productivity. In fact, more than 60% of firms using team collaboration tools report saving three hours a week per mobile worker – that amounts to 12 extra hours of productivity per month. By empowering employees with the right tools for team collaboration, high-performance companies keep their employees focused on the work that will disrupt industries, not sifting through scheduling emails and wasting time traveling to meetings.
Prioritize customer experience
Putting the customer experience above everything gives your customers a commitment to a lasting relationship they will rely on indefinitely. High-performing companies know that putting a name and a face where other companies put a number can mean the difference between a one-time transaction and a fruitful, long-term relationship. Research shows that 79% of customers will commit to a deeper product or service relationship with a brand after a satisfying experience. And, on the flip side, bad impressions have never been so impactful: it takes 12 positive experiences for a brand to make up for one unresolved negative experience – and that’s if the customer even gives you a second chance. Focusing on improving your customer experience in the ways that matter most: providing full context and information to every customer interaction, and even proactively reaching out before a customer knows they have a need, boosts trust in your company and turns customers into brand evangelists.
Drive analytics-based decisions
Using data to make decisions means you’re building a plan around reality instead of subjective conjecture. High-performing companies operate like finely tuned machines specifically because they look at hard data when they are faced with strategic business decisions. Linking data gathered through various business applications with analytics within your business is the best way to make strategic decisions about timing, resource allocation, and research and development. How can you know where you should go next if you don’t know where you’ve been?
What does it look like when a company harnesses these four strategies to become high-performance? Take a look at Michael Johnson Performance (MJP), who recently revolutionized their business through a strategic communications system.
High-Performance in Action: Michael Johnson Performance
Founded by four-time Olympic gold medalist Michael Johnson, MJP is known for its athletic excellence and high-performance training techniques. With coaches and athletes across the globe, communications are a key strategic activity for MJP. MJP recognized that with the mobile nature of its sales and coaching teams, they needed to find a communications system that met them where they traveled: on their mobile devices, with an easy-to-use collaboration approach that would give their customers a superior training experience. By implementing a solution that provided integrated messaging, collaboration and video conferencing software across devices and locations, MJP was able to radically improve the way their coaches communicate with athletes around the world.
Ready to learn more about how you can become a high-performance company? Download a free copy of Digital Transformation for Dummies, or contact us today to learn why high-performance companies are choosing high-performance communications.
A version of this post originally appeared on NoJitter >
A Look at Emerging Cloud Communications Technologies
Communications is more than just connecting people. The right communications technology helps businesses connect the dots between where they are today and where they want to be tomorrow. In this chapter, you explore the future of emerging cloud communications technologies and how they can help your business today and into the future.
Tighter mobile integration
Predicting the need for tighter integration between business communications systems, core business applications, and users’ mobile devices doesn’t take a crystal ball. The mobile workforce of today and the future expects its mobile phones to work everywhere, so productivity can happen anywhere.
Emerging technologies for tighter mobile integration include the following:
Voice over long term evolution (VoLTE) networks: This is a specification that enables more efficient use of available bandwidth and tighter integration with apps over an LTE network.
All IP‐based communications: Carriers move voice services from 2G/3G circuit‐switched (CS) networks to LTE, enabling redeployment and reuse of limited spectrum, and develop apps that are natively voice‐enabled. Today, voice and data are separate, and not all voice is IP‐based — even on LTE networks. In the near future, all LTE connections, both voice and data, will be IP‐based.
Convergence of mobile and enterprise communications (no more “apps”): Today, most unified communications (UC) vendors provide an app for smartphones that enables enterprise communications. Users will soon be able to make and receive corporate calls on their smartphones—not from a separate app, but from a native dialer.
Intelligent reachability: Intelligent reachability allows users to be reached on any of their devices through a single phone number with intelligent call routing capabilities, using location data, Bluetooth, and Wi‐Fi, among others, to route the call to the most appropriate device (rather than simply ringing every device).
New use cases: These enable mobile apps to leverage real‐time communications. Today, an app can trigger the dialer to make a call, but the call happens outside the app. In the future, mobile apps will be natively communications‐enabled via seamless integration to network‐based communications capabilities.
Enterprise routing capabilities: These use location and contextual awareness through more intelligent and capable mobile networks as UC vendors and cellular carriers develop new technologies together.
Software‐defined networking over Internet
Today, cloud communications customers generally connect to their service providers over either a multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) wide-area network or an over the top (OTT) Internet connection. At least some OTT is typically used in almost all environments. For example, it’s common to find MPLS at office locations, while employees use OTT at home or on the road.
MPLS offers the best quality, but it’s more expensive than other options. Many service providers include MPLS services and guarantee the quality of service for their customers.
OTT is less expensive, but it’s basically just an Internet connection. There’s no quality of service guarantee, and voice quality can degrade and even become unacceptable at times. For example, if a neighbor on the same network streams a video during a call, the download could interfere with your call.
A new innovation, known as software‐defined wide area networking (SD‐WAN) is emerging, offering businesses the best of both the MPLS and OTT worlds— better quality at a lower cost. SD‐WAN delivers these benefits by using multiple network connections, including a mixture of OTT and/or OTT with MPLS services.
SD‐WAN provides enterprise‐grade performance, visibility, and control over Internet broadband and private links. WAN traffic is automatically steered across the best links and most‐optimal paths. Dynamic multipath packets are steered to the optimal link based on performance metrics, application requirements, business priority of the application, and link cost. This technology can create a virtual, high‐bandwidth pipe from multiple, inexpensive broadband links and leased lines, providing businesses with improved WAN economics and quality.
Workstream messaging / Team collaboration
Unified communications technology generally includes instant messaging (IM). However, IM generally only supports internal users and is designed primarily for one‐to‐one communications. But a new category of communications is emerging: workstream messaging, sometimes called team collaboration. These messaging services are specifically designed for business collaboration.
Workstream messaging provides the same familiar experience of consumer‐based messaging applications, but offers enterprise‐oriented capabilities, like:
Persistence
Directory integration
Search
Single sign‐on (SSO) support
Integration with other enterprise applications, such as customer relationship management (CRM)
Workstream messaging tools started with basic messaging services but has been expanding into real‐time communications. A cloud communications provider can offer workstream messaging software with extensive real-time capabilities, including support for desk phones and public switched telephone networks (PSTNs).
Because workstream messaging also organizes and shares content (like files and photos), it provides contacts, content, and communications—all in one place. Workstream messaging will combine the benefits of asynchronous communications (like messages and files) with real‐time communications (like voice and video), and become central to business workflows.
Workstream messaging isn’t just another feature of unified communications—it often becomes the preferred means for real‐time communications in an organization.
Workstream messaging is self-organizing, which offers many benefits for users compared to an unwieldy “catch‐all” email inbox. Also, messages are more collaborative because they tend to drive more frequent, less formal, and concise interactions between communicating parties.
Workstream messaging is also superior to IM because, like actual workgroups and teams, it extends beyond organizational boundaries. In the consumer world, messaging‐based apps now dominate communications, but those services do not suitably address enterprise requirements, like security and integration.
Workstream messaging has the potential to change the nature of communications applications, like email, in the future. Organizations using workstream messaging solutions today have benefitted from a significant reduction in internal email volume because these solutions offer many advantages over traditional email systems, like self-organizing message streams.
Some might argue that reduced email isn’t much of a business benefit because messages are effectively moved from one application to another. However, the storage footprint for workstream messaging is generally smaller than for email, and there are numerous other advantages, including:
Organization. Email tends to follow a last‐in‐first‐out model, but organizing content chronologically is not always ideal. Workstream messaging tools organize messages by logically defined containers that group people or topics together. A new message arrives in that space, and the space itself is promoted to the top.
Search. Rather than store conversation history in individual email folders, workstream messaging tools share a single copy of the history among the participants. Everything is in one tool, along with content such as documents or photos.
History. Group history can be easily shared with new members to quickly bring others “up to speed” on a conversation topic.
Shared knowledge. Some workstream messaging tools allow containers to be searched by non‐participants. If someone in the company is looking for someone with knowledge of widgets, for example, then conversations about widgets can be identified to reveal potential experts.
Many cloud communications providers are moving to continuous upgrades rather than scheduled upgrade cycles. Thus, another advantage of cloud communications software is that it’s not only the most current, but also that it’s more secure than premises‐based solutions, in which continuous upgrades aren’t practical.
Michael Johnson Performance (MJP) is an athletic training center founded by four-time Olympic gold medalist Michael Johnson. Working with athletes and coaches around the world, MJP prides itself on leveraging the science behind training and the best technology to optimize athlete performance. As a high-performance company, MJP recognized the need for high performance communications solutions to meet its gold medal standards.
Customer Goals
Connect a global team of coaches, employees and athletes to deliver the most effective training experience
Replace an unsupported Nortel system with a high-performance communications platform that reflects MJP’s gold standard for technology
Improve overall communications to athletes, parents and potential new clients
Solutions
MiCloud Office
Mitel 6800 SIP series phones
MiTeam
Benefits
More personal connections and higher quality collaboration between MJP employees around the world
Improved customer experience thanks to productivity-enhancing applications and CRM integrations that put customer information right at staff’s fingertips
Confidence in a future-ready, reliable system that can grow with the business
We saw a lot of changes to the call center and customer experience landscape in 2016. Cloud communications and virtual agents were on the forefront of everyone’s minds, and social media was more important than ever. 2017 is shaping up to be the year of strategic thinking: better analytics, more intentional social media conversations and innovative ways to involve artificial intelligence. To help you stay on target for 2017, we’ve identified eight of the most influential trends affecting centers so far.
1. Better contact center analytics
Gone are the days of relying on supervisor skill and know-how to get the most out of a contact center agent. Now, even smaller businesses are taking advantage of sophisticated analytics to turn data – like call and screen recordings, chats, SMS messages and more – into truly useful feedback for their agents.
It’s not enough to rely on manual observation and monitoring—there’s just too much information.
More omni-channel call centers are starting to rely heavily on analytics programs to build dashboards with the statistics that affect their businesses. We’re also seeing more and more businesses display this kind of statistical dashboards on user interfaces, so call agents and managers get real-time updates on customer experiences.
In general, we expect more advancements in analytics as companies continue implementing more unified communications platforms and strategies.
2. Omni-channel communications for all
A huge hot button in 2016, omni-channel communications continue to separate proactive businesses from their more reactive counterparts. A holistic view of the customer experience, factoring in an omni-channel approach, is helping businesses give customers a more personal feel to resolutions.
More businesses are recognizing that while a customer journey may begin on one channel, valuable insight and feedback from the customer is taking place on a completely different channel.
Unifying customer communications across channels gives businesses better context for their customers, helps resolve issues more quickly and helps sales agents identify better opportunities for future sales.
3. Widespread adoption of cloud communications in call centers
Many businesses have already adopted cloud communications as part of their communications strategies, but cloud communications has become particularly important for contact centers. With the steady increase in remote call agents, cloud communications are a necessity for businesses who want to take advantage of seamless team communications and collaboration. With cloud communications, traditional office-based contact centers can take on new locations, grow and contract workforces as market needs demand it.
4. More robust customer satisfaction measurements
Customer satisfaction sends huge signals to companies about where and how their businesses could improve. Businesses approach customer satisfaction measurement in different ways, but slick all-in-one measure seem to be holding steady.
Amazon’s cornerstone Negative Response Rate (NRR) strategy continues to be a major part in calculating contact center customer satisfaction in 2017. No matter which measurements businesses are using, however, special care needs to be taken when addressing the customer experience across digital channels.
Using effective reporting and analytics tools that are integrated with your communications systems makes this process automatic and valuable.
5. More remote call center agents
Lower overhead, time zone flexibility, and flexible working hours have made remote contact center workers a stable trend for 2017. With constantly improving and unified cloud communications, remote workers have become a permanent (and beneficial) part of the contact center environment. With collaboration tools, contact center agents can take their work mobile, with access to real-time analytics and customer context.
6. Continued emphasis on self-serve documentation
In 2017, so far we’ve seen a greater emphasis on self-service problem solving information on business websites. Giving customers information quickly helps reduce call volumes, and easy-to-navigate FAQs help narrow down calls to those with sufficiently complex issues. Quick access to self-serve solutions to problems also provides an emotional benefit to customers (that DIY fix high!), and reduces overall call times.
7. Two-way social media conversations
An effective social media presence is a necessity. Customers want a place they can go to give quick feedback, and learn about their favorite businesses. But the way businesses approach their social media conversations is changing.
It’s not enough to make witty posts or share images. Customers are looking for a two-way social media conversation, and when they interact with businesses online, they expect a personalized (and immediate) response.
Responsive businesses are using this trend to create a superb customer experience by unifying communications across channels into one stream. This helps their customers by connecting them with an agent who knows their purchase and service history, provides valuable context, and most importantly: the two-way conversation is public, on a social media platform, so that other customers can see how the business solved the problem.
Negative feedback can be a killer online, and unanswered negative comments make potential customers wary. If you positively resolve issues quickly and in a way that makes it clear the customer is central to the conversation, on the other hand, it leaves your business looking intelligent and caring, motivated by the customer experience.
8. Artificial intelligence integrated into customer interactions
Businesses are getting deeper into predictive analytics, using artificial intelligence (AI) applications to help streamline call center experiences for customers and agents.
We expect that as early adopters continue honing AI applications for call routing, they will become more widely applied. We also expect to see more connections forged between various media channels and streamlined call center response. It’s worth investigating what AI options might benefit your business.
Call center and customer experience trends to activate
These eight trends have already made an impact on the contact center landscape in 2017, and look to continue through the rest of the year. Need more help figuring out how to apply them to your business? Get on a more strategic footing with our contact center solutions.
When assessing vendors for any major IT purchase, you’re making a big commitment in time, energy and budget. You’re putting trust in your vendor to deliver certain benefits and functionality. If your business phone vendor doesn’t deliver, you and your company could suffer because of it.
For business phone system and collaboration vendors, you have to take into account things like value for cost, features and benefits, integrations and interoperability, deployment models and more.
Lately, one seemingly innocuous factor has become increasingly important—vendor stability.
The reason vendor stability has become so important in business communications today is twofold.
First, the speed of change and quick rise of new technologies are changing the communications landscape at a blistering pace, shaking up the traditional order of things. Old vendors may be displaced, but fast-rising vendors may fall just as quickly as they ascended.
Second, vendor stability actually affects a huge number of other factors that affect the relative success or failure of your IT decisions, which we cover in this post.
With so much at stake, it’s important to understand exactly how your communications vendor’s stability can affect you and your company so you can make a truly informed decision.
Jump to a section:
Ability to strategize
Guiding philosophy
Solvency
Relationships and continuity
Squeezing resources
Changing pricing and cost structures
Updates and new features
Integrations and interoperability
Tech support
Timing of IT initiatives
Personal credibility
Ability to strategize
Technology decisions are no longer single points in time. Technology (including business communications and collaboration technology) is changing at such a rapid rate that the decisions you make today will affect your entire IT strategy roadmap down the line.
Your decision becomes less of an isolated event and more of the crest on a wave. You have to make decisions anticipating what changes will come. It’s no easy feat. And it gets even harder with an unstable business phone system vendor.
Uncertainty puts a big kink in your ability to come up with a reliable long-term strategy if you don’t have high confidence in your phone system vendor’s longevity and direction.
Without the confidence that your vendor will still be around long term and the understanding of where they’re headed with their technology, you’ve built unnecessary uncertainty into your own plan.
It’s hard enough to navigate a solid communications and collaboration IT strategy in optimal conditions. There’s no reason to add additional uncertainty to your strategy.
Guiding philosophy
While most IT pros don’t think about a communications vendor’s vision or philosophy as something that directly affects their daily lives, the indirect results of those philosophies certainly can.
If a vendor creates all of their offerings with simplicity and user-friendliness in mind, your company probably comes to rely on those qualities. Likewise, if a different vendor ensures everything they offer can be customized to the hilt. There are endless examples.
Your communications vendor’s approach may even be part of why you selected that vendor in the first place. So, if your vendor’s stability comes into question, will leadership continue to operate under the same philosophy? Will the same leadership even be in place?
Will the user-friendly company start releasing tech that’s harder to use? Will the low-price leader raise their prices? Will the customizable vendor start locking down your choices? You can’t say for sure. But an unpredictable change in philosophy could send your IT strategy for a spin.
Solvency
When you make a major technology purchase, you and your vendor make several commitments to each other. Your commitment is typically a financial one. Their commitment is typically to deliver technology (and possibly services) that meet certain requirements.
If your vendor gets into financial trouble, will they still be able to deliver on their commitments?
If you purchased ongoing support services, will they continue to offer them—or could they drop the contract in bankruptcy? If your contract included future upgrades, could those evaporate in restructuring? If you’re midway through a phased deployment, could they leave your project half done?
Regardless of the specifics, you don’t want to get left high and dry if your business phone system vendor gets into financial trouble.
Find out what industry experts have to say about the stability of specific vendors today >
Relationships and continuity
IT involves a lot of technology, but most people don’t realize how much it relies on relationships. IT pros often get into a rhythm with their day-to-day contacts from certain vendors.
People and teams that know you and your systems can become a huge asset.
Just think of how much time it takes to get a new person up to speed when your vendor changes one of your contacts. Months, sometimes months or years of hard-earned familiarity can be lost. Something your previous contact would have understood without saying now requires 45 minutes of background and half a dozen emails with network diagrams and configuration details.
When a business phone system vendor starts to get unstable, you can expect plenty of personnel changes. Your contacts could get reassigned or let go tomorrow. And there’s no telling how long your new contacts could last.
In fact, you don’t even know if your communications vendor will maintain the same approach to contact with their customers. Historically, if you had a problem, you’d call Jeff, the amazing tech who would stay on the phone until your issue was solved. With instability, trying to call Jeff might get you an automated message that tells you to check out their online FAQs.
Squeezing resources
Every business has a finite amount of resources. When a company’s stability comes into question, the company typically devotes a lot of time and resources to trying to right the ship.
People that may have previously been dedicated to functions that mattered to your success may have big chunks of their time sucked up in efforts to restructure the company or dramatically change the product portfolio or figure out a blitz of special promotions.
The list of activities is long, but the result is the same. All of the activities a communications vendor undertakes to try to re-stabilize the company inevitably takes major resources away from the company’s core activities. That means you get a little less of everything they previously offered.
Changing pricing and cost structures
Business communications vendor instability isn’t always an apocalyptic scenario. But even the adjustments a company can make to try to stay viable when they’re unstable can have a big impact on your business. Take pricing and cost structures.
Your vendor might try to raise margins on certain products to make up revenue, squeezing your IT budget. They could attempt to change one-time purchases to a recurring cost model. They could package up features that were once available a-la-carte. The list goes on.
The point is that your ability to budget for your business communications and collaboration expenses can get very shaky when your vendor is unstable. If you don’t have cushy cash reserves and a very understanding boss (and finance department), you may want to steer clear.
Click here to check out exclusive offers for Avaya customers and prospects >
Updates and new features
Even if a communications vendor doesn’t dissolve completely, instability can still spur less obvious disadvantages. Unstable vendors may stop delivering the same kind of innovation – or even just regular updates and new features – that you expect. Their stable competitors aren’t waiting around for them to catch up, either.
That cool new integration your competitor’s phone system vendor just added? You’re not getting that for eight months. That feature that’s all the buzz at this year’s IT conference? It’s not even on your vendor’s radar.
If you go with an unstable communications vendor, be prepared to answer a lot of questions about, “Why don’t we have that, yet?”
Integrations and interoperability
No business communications and collaboration system lives in a vacuum. It has to plug into CRMs and ERPs and database after database. So ask yourself this question—will all the vendors of products that integrate with your communications system continue to support those integrations if your vendor starts looking shaky?
Companies (like CRM providers) that integrate with many other companies’ offerings have limited time and budget for product development just like everyone else.
If your business phone system vendor begins to falter, your other vendors may begin pulling back support for integrations with those systems.
You may get compatibility for new features later than companies on communications systems from more stable vendors. They may elect to suspend updates until your communications system vendor’s situation has become more concrete. If you’re in a highly competitive industry, even these less catastrophic setbacks can chip away at your competitive edge.
Tech Support
Let’s say you get your phone system set up just the way you want it. It should run perfectly from then on, right?
Wrong.
Anyone in IT knows that’s not the case. Sooner or later, something will stop working the way you want it to.
Maybe a firmware update clashes with custom coding. Maybe your call controller decides it doesn’t feel like talking with your endpoints. Maybe provisioning a new user mysteriously breaks your CRM integration.
There’s not always a rhyme or reason to what goes awry, but even the best system will eventually give you something to figure out. And when it does, you need to know—will your vendor and relevant partners be around to continue offering support for their technology?
If your vendor has a history of stability, you can rest easy knowing that there will be someone there that can bail you out five, 10 even 15+ years down the road.
If your vendor is a little unstable, or just new enough you don’t know how long they’ll be around—they could be out of business before your product licenses expire.
Nobody has time for that. You don’t want to leave yourself vulnerable to running unsupported technology.
Timing of IT initiatives
Completing a major IT purchase can be a huge commitment involving lots of complexity. So why burden yourself with the added complexity of an unstable vendor?
If the communications vendor you’re focused on isn’t on solid footing, what are the chances your IT project will go ahead on schedule? People who have to approve your purchase may want to delay it just to see how your vendor’s situation works out. Can you afford that delay?
Even if you do get your purchase approved, organizational and personnel changes due to your vendor restructuring and downsizing could add their own unforeseen delays.
Whatever you thought your timetable looked like for your communications purchase and deployment before, you better start planning for big delays if you have an unstable vendor at the center of your project.
Personal credibility
Let’s face it, when you have to make decisions about technology for your company, those decisions reflect on your professional reputation. If a vendor you choose becomes unstable or even files for bankruptcy, how do you think it will affect people’s perception of you?
Will they have the same confidence level? Will you get greater scrutiny on the next IT purchase you have to make? Will your company reassign the responsibility for purchase decisions to someone else? Will questioning your judgement about your communications vendor turn into questioning your judgment about other matters?
IT already gets too much blame for circumstances beyond your control. Is it really worth risking your reputation on something that’s within your control?
What’s next
When your investment affects your business, you want to make sure you get the right combination of rock-solid stability and innovation to succeed.
It’s impossible to see the future, but there’s a lot of diligence you can do to give yourself confidence in your decision and protect yourself from undue risk.
It’s that time of the year again, budgets are being finalized and you just got the dreaded email saying you need to find a way to cut 10% off your IT budget. You run through the usual opportunities; conferences, travel, training, coffee service, your phone system—well that last one’s probably not on your short list. However, that does show up on a lot of IT leaders’ radars as a cost cutting opportunity.
Unfortunately, the conversation is generally short-sighted and organizations rarely have a true picture of the costs of a phone system. So, many companies look to open source phone system options as alternatives to more established systems that typically have “sticker prices.” On the surface, open source systems have a reputation for being famously inexpensive. Start with a little bit of know-how, add some IP phones and you’re in business, right?
If only it were that simple.
The up-front costs of an open source phone system might be slim to none, but the more you dig, the more you find costs – and risks – popping up down the road. So before you take the open source plunge on the promise of magical cost savings, be sure you consider these six factors – and the potential costs associated with them.
To clarify, when we say “open source phone systems,” we’re taking about true open source phone systems, where the entire source code is openly available to anyone online who can take it and use it to build their own phone system. We’re not talking about proprietary phone systems, even if those proprietary phone systems offer lots of compatibility and interoperability with third-party technology, like the phone systems we offer at Mitel.
Whether an open source phone system is right for you or not, it’s important to fully understand the risks to make an informed decision that won’t come back to bite you down the road.
1. Knowledge
With an open source phone system, your IT team will need to have a more-than-advanced knowledge of how to install and configure all the necessary components to bring the system to life.
Unless you are going with a managed services option, your team will need to deal with servers, operating systems, open source software, and network configuration. Getting all of these things right isn’t easy, especially when you are trying to do it on your own from community-developed install and administration guides.
Managed services providers are companies that have seen a business opportunity to take on the management of the open source products for you. The problem with this is that you are simply paying someone else to manage your risk for you. The risk did not go away, and the possibility of incurring an unexpected expense for support has increased exponentially.
2. Support
Support will always be a challenge with any type of open source platform, and open source phone systems are no exception.
Their most common flaw is the community, and not all communities are created equally. You are at the mercy of the IT professionals that are willing to take the time to share their knowledge of how things work in their environment. Often times you will be pointed to random support forums and information websites that are put together by the community.
How do you know if the answer you saw on the forum will fix your issue or make it worse? You don’t know.
No one is held responsible for putting out correct information about how the product works.
The “trick” to fix today’s issue might unravel into a larger issue the next time you apply an update to the OS on your server, a security patch to the application, or any change for that matter.
You have to trust that they told you the correct solution to your problem and it will continue to work in the future.
3. Product roadmap
In the open source community, you can typically find very little information on the exact direction a product set is headed. Sometimes these open source products disrupt the marketplace and push proprietary software vendors to advance their products, but most times, they lag behind the rest of the industry.
Vendors of proprietary technology spend hundreds of millions of dollars on research and development activities to push their products forward, as well as the underlying technologies that run those products.
Customers, boards, shareholders and more hold software and hardware vendors accountable for the direction their product sets are going. The open source community, however, typically responds to the loudest voice in the room—and not necessarily the one that creates the most value.
That feature you love? That process you use? With open source software, it could suddenly be sunset or go unsupported in future releases.
Working with a proprietary software vendor, you can rest assured they will be able to recommend a solution, because they simply know how their products are being used and the direction they are going in the future.
4. Customization
The age-old argument for using an open source phone system is that you can customize it in any way you see fit. You can integrate it with almost anything you can dream of. It sounds a little too good to be true, and it is.
Sure, you can customize to your heart’s content, but when you do, you just became a software developer. Is that the focus of your IT team?
Can you keep up with the necessary development cycles and cost to just keep it running? Probably not in your budget-cutting plans.
If you’ve been in IT long enough, you’ve heard someone say, “it worked with the last version, but not with this upgrade.” Working with a turnkey solution, your customization opportunities are limited, but supported. You will never be left out in the cold to figure it out yourself.
When you take an honest look at the customization needs of your business, you’ll most likely uncover that many needs are actually wants. And there’s a good chance you can save more money simply redesigning a business process than it would cost to support those customization wants.
5. Licensing
The number one and two arguments I’ve heard for going with any open source product are the licensing cost and length of licensing agreement terms. Often, these open source phone systems are free or only cost a few hundreds of dollars to license.
But open source licenses typically include only the bare minimum
Costs for support, installation, customization – even the additional talent or skills required to get open source systems running and keep them running – can quickly add up.
On the other hand, most the things I’ve touched on so far are typically wrapped into the cost of licensing for turnkey software. You know what you are getting from the product when you pay the licensing fees. It’s all very up-front and transparent, while the costs of an open source system tend to be unplanned surprises.
Regardless of the term limit on your contract with a proprietary software vendor, you are just as committed to them as you are with an open source product.
From a legal standpoint, you can certainly walk away today from your open source product and use something else, but you still have to deal with migrating to a new phone system. Switching systems is not something you can do overnight—it will likely take you just as long as the term limit on your contract. Free licenses are simply the bait to get you on the hook for using their software.
6. Security
The source code for the application lives up to its—namesake, open.
Anyone with a computer and a little time can simply download the same source files you did and dig through them for vulnerabilities.
They can even test out their hacks in real time to see if they work before they deploy them on an unsuspecting company. I don’t want to over emphasize this to the point that it sounds too doom-and-gloom, but it’s the reality of the situation.
This is not to say that proprietary software solutions are not vulnerable to security issues—security is a continuum, not a yes-or-no situation. But I would rather rely on the vendor that created the software, their development processes, their teams, and their contractual obligations that their software has been thoroughly tested for security flaws and all steps have been taken to mitigate these risk.
This again points to your willingness, or lack there of, to put your faith in the community of people that are checking the open source software for security flaws.
Understanding the true costs
Open source phone systems are very attractive to cost-conscious IT leaders. And for companies that truly know what they’re getting into and have the resources to support those systems, they may be a good option.
But be careful of how you define cost when evaluating open source phone systems.
You are likely to end up paying significantly more for that open source phone system (which promised you the cheaper price tag) than you would have if you went with a turnkey solution from commercially proven phone system provider.
