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Where innovation grows and security is our job.
We ensure you deliver an out-of-this-world customer experience.
And help your business save your customers from communication traffic jams.
Help your customers find your business
And make teamwork with all of your business apps seamless.
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Unified Communications and Collaboration (UCC) integrates communication forms like voice, video, and data services with software applications. This creates a cohesive environment that enhances business processes by making it easier for employees to connect, collaborate, and communicate effectively.
In today’s hyper-connected, always-on business environment, organizations face unprecedented pressure to operate swiftly and efficiently. Quickly finding the right people, accessing vital data, and exchanging information can determine your business’s success.
Unified Communications and Collaboration addresses these challenges by enabling more intuitive and efficient connections. UCC simplifies connectivity and improves business processes by uniting real-time and historical communication, like voice, video, and data services, into one environment.
Adopting a UCC strategy offers three significant benefits that can dramatically enhance employee collaboration and productivity:
1. Reduce Time Wasted
UCC provides real-time presence information across your organization, allowing employees to see their coworkers’ availability instantly. This feature reduces communication delays, enabling faster decision-making by helping you reach the right person quickly. According to a study by Frost & Sullivan, companies that implemented UCC solutions saw a 15% reduction in time spent on daily communications.
2. Connect Geographically Dispersed Employees
With businesses increasingly operating on a global scale, UCC is essential for bridging geographical distances. In Mid-Missouri, where teams are spread across Jefferson City, Columbia, and beyond, UCC enables real-time collaboration without in-person meetings. This capability ensures that your top talent, regardless of location, can contribute effectively to projects.
3. Provide Freedom of Choice for Maximum ROI
A comprehensive UCC strategy enables a mobile-first, any-device approach, letting employees choose their preferred communication methods. With BYOD policies on the rise, Columbia and Mid-Missouri businesses find that UCC reduces Shadow IT risks and boosts productivity. Gartner reports that companies adopting mobile-first UCC strategies see a 25% increase in employee satisfaction and engagement.
Studies continue to show that UCC helps organizations save time and money by improving communication efficiency. For example, seamlessly switching between communication methods, like turning a chat into a conference call, greatly enhances information exchange. Organizations that implement UCC solutions reduce expenses related to employee downtime, travel, and mobile work by an average of 43%.
A Nexus study found that over 60% of firms using UCC save three hours a week per mobile worker. For Mid-Missouri businesses, this adds up to 12 extra hours of productivity per employee monthly—time for growth and innovation.
Unified Communications and Collaboration (UCC) is more than just a technological upgrade—it’s a strategic initiative that can transform how your business operates. For companies in Jefferson City, Columbia, and across Mid-Missouri, implementing a UCC strategy can lead to significant improvements in efficiency, communication, and employee satisfaction.
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You probably already know that businesses are adopting video conferencing technology at rapid pace. MarketsandMarkets recently projected that the enterprise video market, which includes video conferencing systems, will reach $36.8 billion by 2020.
In fact, more than 54 percent of employees regularly take part in work-related video conferences, but not all of them are eager participants, according to a recent report.
So why are roughly half of employees hesitant to turn on their cameras for work meetings? There are plenty of causes, but here are five of the most common reasons keeping employees from using videoconferencing software.
While meeting holders would prefer to think everyone on their call is giving the meeting their full attention, the reality is usually much different.
Meeting attendees are replying to emails, preparing presentations, eating lunch, and doing other work while (hopefully) muted on conference calls.
If the same people joined a video call or video conference, they would have to give the call their full attention. They wouldn’t be able to multi-task. And while plenty of research has shown that multi-tasking actually hurts productivity, many workers still operate under the illusion that they can get more done by multi-tasking.
Sometimes, these kinds of behaviors can happen in in-person meetings, too, but being on video makes multi-tasking much more obvious, hence a big reason many workers avoid video conferencing.
Want to try and cut down on this objection? Help people understand the real cost of multi-tasking and the productivity benefits of giving a task their attention.
People feel like they have to multi-task because they’re in too many meetings? Have workers take a hard look at whether all of their meeting attendees are critical to their call.
Video calls are great, but a few of the details mean that they’re are not quite the same as in-person communications. One thing some people dislike about video calls is the disconnect in eye contact.
With most videoconferencing systems, you have to choose whether to look at the other participant on your screen or look at your camera.
If you look at the other participant on your screen, it doesn’t look like you’re making eye contact to them. And if you look at your camera to appear to make eye contact on their side, you can’t focus on the other participant’s face on your screen. Either way, someone gets left out with the way most videoconferencing cameras are set up.
For some, the difference is imperceptible, but to others, that slight disconnect in making eye contact – or trying to figure out to look at their screen or their camera – is enough to make them ditch video altogether.
Whenever I get a meeting invite, it’s always an adventure to see what I’ll have to do to get everything to work properly. Sometimes a video conference works perfectly, but in the real world, things rarely go off without a hitch.
For starters, with so many different videoconferencing software choice, I often have to download a new client onto my computer before I can join the meeting (though you can simplify this a little by standardizing on one videoconferencing software throughout your company).
Maybe my sound works and my video won’t come on. Maybe it’s the reverse. Maybe the presenter is having trouble sharing their screen. Whatever, the case, you can quickly lose five minutes or more just getting everyone’s settings correct. And that’s before you get to highly technical issues.
If your network does not have quality of service (QoS) rules in place, then you’re highly unlikely to have a good video collaboration experience.
More importantly, if your network does not have packet prioritization rules in place, then your video calls might get choppy or completely interrupted when other network users are doing something as simple as sending emails.
On a typical phone call, it doesn’t matter if an employee calls in from a messy living room in their pajamas. But if meeting participants find out the same call is a videoconference, all of a sudden they have to scramble to get presentable.
Video calls add a whole new dimension to the meetings. Something about being on camera – even if it’s just for employees who see them in person every day – makes people more self-conscious.
And it goes beyond simply being bathed, clothed and offering a background that doesn’t look like a disaster area. People often feel they’re being put on the spot, as if they’re being filmed for a video.
Is my hair messed up? Is there food on my face from lunch? How does my makeup look? Is my collar crooked? These are things that people worry about during video calls that make many people abandon videoconferencing altogether.
One of the biggest culprits may be the little window where video conference participants can see themselves. While this is probably intended to help participants line up their camera or make sure they have decent lighting, it often acts like a mirror, and people can end up fixating on it, distracted by their appearances. There’s nothing like staring at yourself in a slight fisheye lens under fluorescent lighting to ruin a worker’s focus and keep them from turning on the camera at their next meeting.
If you work in an open-plan office, jumping on a video call from your desk can be a risky proposition. People near you may be on other calls. There could be an impromptu standup nearby. Etiquette challenged coworkers may interrupt with no regard for what you’re doing. Or your coworkers may just enjoy making faces in the background. Whatever your coworkers are like, modern office arrangements can make it challenging to conduct video calls without interruption.
Why aren’t people using your company’s chosen videoconferencing software? Now you know. And knowing is the first step in how to raise videoconferencing adoption at your company—which is good because meeting via video has some great benefits. Making closer personal connections, reducing travel costs, having more productive online collaboration, and improved team cohesion are just a few.
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Do you always deliver a great customer experience?Improving customer experience is a top priority for today’s executive because of the impact it can have on the bottom line. With the variety of communication methods now available, managing the customer experience is more complex than ever before. For today’s contact centers, it’s vital to study customer service best practices from a variety of verticals to learn and adapt your strategy for success — which is why we’re looking to help out.
Download the article for some harrowing tales of terror from prominent customer service experts, and find out how they were resolved — or how they could have been avoided in the first place.
“Processes and categories only go so far when dealing with human beings.”
Jeannie Walters, CEO, 360 Connect
“Convey the right information from the beginning.”
Roy Atkinson, Senior Writer/Analyst, UBM Tech
“You always have control to deliver amazing customer experiences.”
Shep Hyken, CAO, Shepard Presentations
“Mistakes happen. It’s what happens next that matters.”
Dave Evans, VP Social Strategy, Lithium
You have one chance to make a lasting impression with your customers. A contact center solution can help you enhance the customer experience from the moment calls reach your Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system to call resolution. They help you to attract and retain customers, and please them for less.
When it comes to customer satisfaction, Swanson Health Products is America’s #1 rated catalog/Internet merchant. So when they needed a solution that would help them track and handle their calls, emails and chat, they turned to Towner Communications MiContact Center.
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Pokémon GO is a hot topic. It seems you can’t escape it—in the news, on social media, or in your day-to-day life as you see people of all ages hunched over their phones, walking around outside. This wildly popular application has spurred discussions across a variety of topics—health, social interaction, marketing, gamification, pedestrian safety, and more.
There’s another lesson to learn from Pokémon GO: the value of a single, comprehensive application to enable team and project collaboration.
Observing strangers collaborate through this application can open your eyes to the potential potency (and potential shortcomings) of a business application that can foster teamwork in your business.
For those who aren’t sure how Pokémon GO works, it’s a real-time application in which you can catch Pokémon while walking around. With geo-tracking and real-time updates, players all experience the same interface—provided they’re in similar areas. The same creatures pop up on the screen, at the same time, at the same location. This accounts for many observations of increased social interaction, and also accounts for the parallel in team and project collaboration.
Parks are one of the best places to catch Pokémon. My husband and I frequent the park closest to us as a place to walk around and play Pokémon GO. We recently encountered a player who was on a quest for a specific Pokémon. He wasted no time in telling us he drove over 45 minutes to reach this park because he heard it was rich with a Pokémon he desperately wanted to add to his collection and asked us if we’d seen any.
We pointed him to an area where we found the creature he sought and we heard his triumph when he found it and added it to his collection. He proceeded to scour the park. Anytime we found the Pokémon he was looking for, we called out to him to help direct him to the right area to catch it. Strangers collaborating to chase invisible pocket monsters on a smartphone application—who’d have thought?
For this particular Pokémon GO player, he was able to complete his quest for catching Pokémon because all players experience the application in real time. By collaborating with other players, he identified the park as a place he needed to visit and he was able to add the necessary Pokémon to his collection. This story is a testament to the power of a real-time application and online collaboration capabilities accessible by all. If a player can accomplish so much from the application, what implications are there for businesses?
The Pokémon GO collaboration experience could be better because it doesn’t offer the in-app ability to message another player or group, or share images of any kind. Although the application revealed the necessary Pokémon for this player, he relied on friends and external websites to provide the best possibility of completing his collection.
Maybe it’s because I’m a millennial but I honestly think the Pokemon Go collaboration experience could be both easier and improved: taking a seamless application operating in real-time and adding the ability to message others, post discussion threads, share images and insights, and work in other applications and links would enable any player to get the information needed to play effectively.
Relying on multiple applications to allow full collaboration creates a disjointed, less effective experience than if all of the capabilities were built-in.
It’s estimated that the average employee spends up to an hour every day trying to get in contact with people, find meeting rooms, and track projects and emails.
Helping employees easily contact each other can immediately boost productivity.
For a workforce on-the-go, uniting multiple channels of communications in a single mobile-first application—email, chat, phone calls, text, video—can drastically improve both productivity and output for a business. Top team collaboration tools make it a point to prioritize accessibility, visibility, and real-time tracking of various projects, documents, and presentations so workers get more out of every hour they put in.
Back to the zealous Pokémon GO player who traveled 45 minutes to get to the park that held the Pokémon he needed.
On the positive side, the synchronized application experience paired with real-time capabilities helped him to complete his. On the negative side, he had to lean on other applications to accomplish his mission, and was ultimately successful.
A comprehensive interface certainly would have helped him accomplish his goal more efficiently, just as a more complete collaboration tool helps workers get more done faster.
Unlike Pokémon Go, there are applications with a complete set of tools to help your employees collaborate. If you give your employees the opportunity to collaborate with a communications system that promotes project collaboration on a platform designed with mobile in mind, your employees will be able to work efficiently and effectively, at any time, in any location.
Many businesses today have one piece of the puzzle—like Pokémon GO—but choosing a truly integrated collaboration experience can really give you a competitive edge.
There are many communications vendors for businesses to choose from. In order to get the most effective solution for your business, make sure it is:
Our MiCloud Office platform has all these features and more. To get an idea of what a first-class, comprehensive system looks like, watch the MiCloud Office Demo.
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Whether for cost-savings, BYOD considerations, ease of administration, or reliability, school districts across the United States are actively shifting communication and collaboration to the cloud. It’s a Path to the Cloud!
As part of this shift, schools and administrative offices are deploying Google’s cloud-based education apps – like Google’s free email services – allowing them to free up millions of dollars for other initiatives.
Some K-12 organizations have hesitations about the security of sensitive data in the cloud, but as adoption grows across the education sector, more and more schools are considering cloud technology to achieve their goals. Many educational organizations seeking the benefits of cloud communications and collaboration look to Mitel. We manage a rich ecosystem of solutions that’s integrated with the largest technology partners in the industry, including Google and Microsoft.
Many educational organizations seeking the benefits of cloud communications and collaboration look to Mitel. We manage a rich ecosystem of solutions that’s integrated with the largest technology partners in the industry, including Google and Microsoft.
Microsoft Lync Integration
Mitel MiVoice for Lync, for example, seamlessly integrates features – like integrated softphone, voice integration and click-to-call support – with Microsoft applications to offer robust voice capabilities.
Google Integration
Mitel MiCollab is our anywhere, any-device collaboration software. It integrates with Google Cloud Platform and Google Apps, enabling collaboration through voice; instant messaging; presence; and audio, video, and web conferencing. MiCollab also seamlessly interacts with Google’s calendar, email and contact management apps.
Bonus: With MiCollab, a user’s presence status automatically updates according to the Google Calendar scheduling.
“Given the explosive growth of cloud-based apps and communications, Mitel provides the best path to the cloud for schools.”
Cloud Deployment Flexibility
With a unified communications and collaboration architecture focused on ease of use and administration, Mitel provides public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid deployment models. With Mitel, your school can deploy applications in a private cloud, a public cloud, on premise, or a combination thereof. And you’re never locked in to a single deployment model—you can move applications when conditions change.
The software remains the same; only the location changes. It’s how our MiCloud for Education solutions easily accommodate school districts’ changing needs and preferences over time.
Cloud Security & Reliability
Cloud deployments merit special consideration when it comes to security. Your educational organization will need to work with communications and collaboration providers like Mitel to isolate and protect your networks, applications and data. But the technologies and strategies for securing cloud-based deployments are advancing every day, and Mitel is leading the charge.
If you’re concerned about the reliability of cloud communications, consider this: If your network fails, communication with the outside world will be impacted whether your system is on premise or in the cloud. Fortunately, in a highly distributed school system, a network failure in any building will only impact a single location, and mobile communications can help your school weather the event until full service is restored.
Finding Your Path to the Cloud
Hundreds of school districts throughout the United States have deployed Mitel Voice and Unified Communication solutions. They’ve found that the cloud is a far more dependable platform than they expected, and that it offers advantages they had never imagined. It’s time to start taking a serious look at long-term strategies for cloud communications at your school—and how MiCloud for Education can help.
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The term “contact center” often conjures up an image of large numbers of agents handling incoming and outgoing calls all day, every day. In some cases, this is an accurate interpretation of how customer engagement truly works.
However, Gartner predicts that by 2020, customers will manage 85 percent of their relationship with an enterprise without interacting with a human
With this in mind, it’s clear that contact center technology is going to increasingly drive digital engagements and organizational workflows. The focus is on removing departmental silos to ensure the full context can be brought to every single customer engagement and interaction.
By way of example, a European sea port had a challenge connecting their large database of lorry drivers to incoming ships full of containers that needed ongoing transportation around the continent. The drivers were typically paid a day-rate, so the company needed a system to ensure that they efficiently allocated jobs, and then accurately and quickly paid for the work they’d completed. This may sound simple, but with one of the world’s busiest sea ports and a very large number of contract drivers, this was proving a complex scenario to manage well, and was potentially open to error and fraud.
The port ultimately worked with us to design a system that integrated our contact center with the company’s ERP (enterprise resource planning) system. As a new ship arrives in the port, the ERP system calculates the number of trucks, forklifts and cranes required and the contact center then automatically contacts the drivers by SMS. The driver responds by SMS, directly back into the contact center, indicating acceptance of the job in the ERP system. The driver then receives the destination by SMS and makes the delivery. Goods-in confirms the delivery by SMS, and the driver is automatically flagged for payment.
Similarly, a large truck manufacturer wanted to ensure fast, efficient, consistent and cost-effective repair and recovery when one of its vehicles suffered a breakdown. With their new system, in the event of a breakdown, the driver makes a quick call or SMS into a centralized contact center. The agent uses a desktop manager application to locate the nearest approved repair and recovery service, with an SMS triggering a callout to the truck location. The truck is repaired, confirmed by SMS and the contact center generates a ticket (with the call recording and SMS attached as an audit trail). Payment is then automatically processed via ERP integration.
In both cases, the company used customer engagement technology and its close integration with the ERP system to facilitate a series of automated workflow processes to minimize human involvement and associated error. The organizations both ended up with an effective solution that both improved efficiency and removed costs. Learn how we can help and talk with us today.
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Mitel’s Record-a-Call feature offers you an easy way to archive calls. You can use this for training purposes, for your own reference, or to keep a record of advice that has been given to a client.
Before recording calls, check your legal position. You may need to notify your callers that they are being recorded.
This Mitel phone guide is for MiVoice Business (also known as Mitel 3300 ICP) users only.
You can start recording at any time by pressing the Record Call key on your Mitel IP phone. If you don’t have a feature key assigned to Record Call, you can ask us at Towner Communications if this option is available with your current system.
Many businesses find it more straightforward to record every call. If your phone system is set up in this way, you don’t need to manually start recording.
While your call is being recorded, you can use the soft keys on your phone to Pause, Stop or Resume the recording operation.
Pressing the Erase soft key, or the Cancel key, will stop the recording without saving it.
Note: if you put a call on hold, the recording will automatically stop. If you bring the call back from hold, a new recording will start.
You can listen to call recordings from your Mitel IP phone. All of your recordings are saved in your voicemail mailbox, so simply dial your mailbox like normal and follow the prompts.
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Do you have a cloud communications provider? If you do, are you happy with them? It’s a question many business owners don’t ask themselves enough. Cloud communications is an investment of capital, time, and human resources—an investment that you should be thrilled with. Once we sign contracts, we tend to accept the level of service we receive without analyzing our satisfaction with what we actually get. Part of this resignation stems from the contracts signed up front: breaking contracts usually means serious financial detriment. In the business world, that’s highly frowned upon because you’re costing the company even more money. But if you weren’t bound by a contract, what would that mean to you?
Business relationships are susceptible to the same characteristics of any personal relationship—sometimes entering into a contract with a vendor starts off flawlessly and everything is sunshine and rainbows. But far too often in business, once the dotted line is signed, things change: service levels drops off, promised features become elusive, and costs can skyrocket. Being stuck with a cloud communications provider who doesn’t put your business needs first is more than irritating—it can harm your customer service, internal productivity, and your bottom line.
Not every cloud communications provider is created equal. Once you choose your provider, you may initially be happy. You get the service level you expect, the features you wanted—all at a price you are comfortable paying. Technology is notorious for constantly evolving. And your provider may not offer the latest features you’re interested in for your business. While you may be happy with every other aspect of the business relationship, the bottom line is this: limited cloud features and offerings could jeopardize your business.
I’d wager most businesses stay with their cloud communications provider because the contract is king. Why evaluate the level of service and feature offerings if both are satisfactory and you can’t go anywhere anyway? Evaluation is crucial to consider because the best-performing and most lucrative companies don’t just think about today, but think about their company’s future. Still, many companies are wary of breaking contracts. But what if the contract was removed from the equation? Right now, our cloud contract buyout program could remove the barrier for you and give your business the best cloud communications applications for today andtomorrow.
Now that we can remove your existing contract from the equation, there are some questions you should ask yourself to truly gauge your satisfaction with your current provider.
1. Am I happy with the level of service I receive from my current cloud provider?
2. Do I have the features I need to maximize my business productivity?
3. Is my cloud provider a leader in Gartner’s five magic quadrants?
4. Do I trust my cloud provider to offer the latest and greatest features?
5. Is my cloud communications platform easy to use?
6. Does my cloud communications platform enable team and project collaboration?
If you answered “yes” to all the above, congratulations! You have a cloud communications provider that works for you and your business needs.
If you answered “no” to one question, you might have the right cloud provider for you—but why not verify by checking just in case?
If you answered no to two or more questions, you should strongly consider looking into Mitel’s cloud contract buyout program. As a leader in Gartner’s five magic quadrants, Mitel is uniquely positioned to provide the cloud communications your business or enterprise needs.
Nearly 2,000 cloud subscribers choose Mitel each day. Businesses across the world trust Mitel for their cloud communications solutions—see how Towner Communications can help.
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