Is your business ready to seize the opportunities for digital transformation ahead in 2022? Will your communications system be an invaluable asset in achieving growth — or a burden that limits your performance?
Many businesses are finding they are weighed down by technology choices they had to make quickly during the pandemic. In the face of shutdowns, communications software became the lynchpin to allow employees to keep collaborating, meet with customers, and work productively from home. And, with little time to assess communications platform pros and cons, they made quick purchase decisions that left them with:
A mix of disjointed communications tools that are awkward for employees navigate
Unanticipated costs associated with higher maintenance expenses and complex IT support
Uneven performance, with some tools more reliable than others, creating dissatisfied customers and frustrated staff
Looking ahead, your business has the opportunity to evolve from worrying about ‘keeping things moving’ to focus on optimizing operations. Maximize productivity and adaptability with a purpose-built communications platform for the evolving hybrid work environment. To take advantage of that opportunity, you’ll want to make 3 smart choices:
Choose the best communications architecture
Select the right communications solution
Identify the ideal migration path for your business
#1 Choose The Cloud To Streamline And Strengthen Your Technology
The cloud is the easiest way to simplify and supercharge your communications technology. By consolidating disjointed communications tools into an all-in-one, cloud-based solution that offers team and video collaboration, mobility, and voice capabilities, you can unleash greater productivity and performance, while eliminating the cost and resource burdens of managing your current systems. A cloud-based communications solution:
Is easier to manage and maintain:
Cloud comms platforms: flexible, scalable, low maintenance, freeing IT for growth initiatives.
Provides more for less:
Cost-effective solution with integrated powerful features for your business needs.
Removes uncertainty and costs:
Cloud-based solutions eliminate large, up-front technology investments and unexpected repair costs. All you pay is a predictable and affordable monthly subscription fee.
Remains effortlessly up to date:
Cloud comms platform ensures up-to-date software and security, hassle-free for businesses.
#2 Choose The UCaaS Leader To Meet Your Needs Today And Tomorrow
Customer and employee expectations have permanently changed. Businesses have gained new confidence in their staffs’ ability to work from anywhere. Employees value the balance that hybrid working environments provide. And customers just want great service — and don’t care where the employee supporting them is working from.
For these reasons, business communications software will remain your foundation for employee productivity and customer service excellence. Empower growth with an intuitive, scalable, cloud-based business communications platform
That’s why Mitel has embarked on a strategic partnership with RingCentral. The RingCentral MVP solution has been ranked a leader in the UCaaS Gartner Magic Quadrant for seven consecutive years. Mitel and RingCentral unite for powerful UCaaS solution enhancing businesses’ agility.
Increasing employee engagement: Your state-of-the-art RingCentral MVP communications solution will allow employees and customers to interact quickly, easily, and efficiently. Increase productivity with an all-in-one app for seamless remote and hybrid work, integrated with critical systems.
Meeting higher customer expectations:
Boost employee productivity, serve customers seamlessly with Mitel and RingCentral’s leading UCaaS and contact center solutions, offering flexibility and choice.
Achieving unprecedented agility:
The pace of business has never been faster. So, it’s important to know you can count on the Mitel and RingCentral partnership to provide superior performance and reliability. In 2021, RingCentral earned Gartner’s #1 ranking among UCaaS vendors for ‘completeness of vision.’ So when you choose RingCentral MVP, you can be confident that they are already anticipating your future communications needs and preparing to add new, next-generation innovations to the platform.
#3 Choose A Trusted Partner To Customize Your Digital Transformation Path
If you create the right migration plan to the right cloud-based communications solution, you can have your cake and eat it, too. Chances are, your business has already made investments in a communications platform. You’ll want a migration plan that takes that into consideration, so you’ll need the guidance of a trusted partner with extensive expertise in the full range of communications deployments — including on-premise, private cloud, and public cloud systems. That’s why you can trust Mitel and our experienced partner network to ensure a smooth transition that’s based on a custom migration plan and timeline for your business.
You’re in charge: Mitel has a track record of being 100% customer focused. Let us do the heavy lifting. We start every customer migration by listening to your needs and understanding your existing investments, so we can provide you with a range of options to choose from.
Investment protection: After evaluating your options, if the best plan for your business means staying with an on-premises or private cloud platform for the time-being, Mitel remains a global market leader in these segments and has a clear, innovative roadmap for these platforms going forward.
Leading technology to facilitate your migration: Mitel’s CloudLink architecture is a tested and proven technology that helps customers enhance the performance of their existing investments while they migrate to the cloud. That’s why Mitel’s CloudLink architecture will become tightly integrated with RingCentral’s MVP solution, paving the path for Mitel on-premises customers to move to the cloud at the pace that is best for them.
Women owned businesses are the best, we know because we are one! During the month of March we are offering an amazing deal to our fellow women owned businesses to make moving their business communication solution to the cloud SUPER EASY. No install fees and no contract make this opportunity unbeatable.
For those who are on the fence about change to the cloud here are the top three reasons you should switch today:
Save Money: Send us a copy of your current telephone line invoice for us to evaluate. Often moving the cloud can offset that price even providing a savings and give you new telephone hardware. There ZERO reason not to make the change.
Easy collaboration for users: Mobile apps are made for the cloud. Users can use a mobile app in tandem with a physical desk phone or just the mobile app as their extension. This makes is simple for your internal team to collaborate from anywhere, and will take your customer support to the next level.
No Capital investment: Low to no upfront cost to your business! By removing installation fees and ensuring you are signing a long term contract we can get your business moved to the cloud for your telephone solutions quickly and pain free.
To take advantage of this opportunity reach out to us today
It is essential for businesses to consider a Cloud Communication Strategy Upgrade in today’s fast-paced digital world.
‘s time to get strategic! You do it in every other aspect of your business, why aren’t you being strategic when it comes to managing your technology. And by the way a huge part of your technology is your phone and communication solutions.
Lean into the idea of LEVERAGE
Tons of people think they know technology, tons of people in reality DON’T! Wrap your brain around this… “a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.” We’re willing to bet when you stop and engage experts to analyze the technology you have in place, you’ll find that the equipment you already have could have the capabilities to do really cool things you want it to, but haven’t set it up for. Think about the fact that humans only use 10% or their brain’s capacity OR you know that your smart phone has way more features and capabilities than you know how to use. IT’S THE SAME THING HERE!
So in our first light bulb moment, we learned that before we let our current vendor or our new vendor talk us into a brand new system (a rip and replace as we call it) we should first completely vet what our current system can do. Would upgrades and or updates be the solution to our needs?
And here’s a hint, if you aren’t staying current on upgrades either because you want to save money or your vendor isn’t helping keep you current, you’re going to end up spending much more money in the long run.
Know the TCO
You need to be aware of your Total Cost of Ownership. This one is huge. It’s the difference between an operating expense and a capital expense. Cloud systems do come with a smaller upfront costs by nature, however you might be really shocked when you sit down and do the math. There are indeed fees that will pop up and are unpredictable and unavoidable like usage tax, rental fees etc.
This Mitel MiVoice Business customer is configured for 100 employees. Take a look at the total cost comparison
Having already paid for the system, you’ve eliminated the cost for the hardware and software that runs it. You own it. But the simple addition of MiCollab to facilitate chat and collaboration, you’ve provided your team with features and functions you would get from switching to a new cloud vendor. Most importantly, the updates and upgrades needed to keep your system operating at peak efficiency at all times are covered by the Mitel Software Assurance plan. So, over a one-year period, the
TCO for your on-premises system would be $37,000 and over three years the TCO would be $81,000.
STRATEGIC wins the race
Eventually, all businesses will end up with some form of a cloud-based solution. However, your communications system requirements should be dictated by how the system is expected to contribute to your daily business operation and your communications strategy should evolve with your business needs
If you can address all your requirements by leveraging your existing on-premises equipment, then that’s probably what you should be thinking about before you consider cloud migration. But chances are, there are incremental updates and upgrades you should be making today that will keep your system as flexible as possible, ready to capture opportunities when they arise and enable you to better support the needs of today’s workforce.
LEVERAGE Towner
Towner makes it easy for you to think strategically about how best to leverage your communications solutions.
Our warranty programs are build to keep your current and relevant. Through our ongoing system evaluations and health checks, we always know where you stand if you hold a warranty with us.
Then when it truly is time to move to the cloud, our team as well as your team know what features and functionality are needed to make the transition as smooth and cost effective as possible
Everyone loves a good upgrade. Especially when it means quick new features, and slick and easy use. That’s why Effective April 1, 2020 the Atlas end-user dashboard is being retired and replaced by BOOMEA!
About Boomea
Boomea is a business-driven chat application, available across multiple platforms, built from the
ground up with Unified Communications in mind. Bringing people and teams together with the
ability to chat anytime, anywhere, Boomea provides that often missing chat integration to your
business. Ever had to work remotely and the only convenient way to talk to your team would be
to call them? Now, you can simply open the Boomea app to chat with your co-workers. With the
seamless, easy-to-use ability to send photos, videos, and any other file type, you can feel confident
that you’ll be prepared in any situation.
Features
Chat
Send chat messages to other users in your account. Emojis are included and file attachments are
supported. Public Channels
• Any user can create a public channel
• Any user within the account can join a public channel and read the entire chat history within the channel so keep it PG!
• Any user can invite any other user within the account to join the channel Private Channels
• Any user can create a private channel • Only the channel creator can invite other users within the account to join the channel
• Only the channel creator can eject other users from the channel Direct Messages
• These messages are between you and your coworkers! Direct messages include one-on-one messages as well as group messages
• Mentions
• Use the @ symbol followed by the user’s name to direct a chat to a singular person when in a group or channel. The user will receive a notification that they have an unread mention and the channel or chat will show a badge of the number of unread messages. Outside Messages
• With contacts integration, Boomea now allows you to chat directly with your contacts who also have the Boomea UC client! When a person outside your account initiates a chat with you, a chat access rule is presented as a question for you to answer regarding whether you want to accept their request to chat, ignore the request for a set period of time, or block the user. This chat access rule is per-person and can be changed at any time in your Boomea account settings. Imagine how this can help by chatting with support!
• When communicating with a contact in another Boomea account as an outside message, you may also define whether you wish to share your chat presence with that contact.
Call Routing
A user may manage their own call routing by defining which devices to ring, in which order, and for what duration of time. Other configurable options include: No Answer Route
• This is where to send the call if the user does not answer Busy Route
• This is where to send the call if the user rejects the call Outside Timeframe Route
• This is where to send the call if the caller at- tempts to call the user outside their defined time frame Time Frame Schedule
• This is how a user can set the time frames that callers may reach them
Voicemail
When the user gets a voicemail on the Atlas platform, the voicemail will be sent to the Boomea application and the record will appear
without the need to refresh anything. The user may then listen to the voicemail, download, and/or delete the voicemail. When a voicemail
is deleted, it removes it from the user’s voicemail in their phone as well for easy voicemail management!
Call History
Call records from the Atlas platform are pushed to the Boomea application in real time so a user can be up-to-date with their calls,
both missed and answered! No refresh is necessary as the records will appear as they are created.
Call Recording
When a user is recorded on the Atlas platform, the recording will be sent to the Boomea application and the record will appear without the need to refresh anything. If the user has access to other user’s recordings via management permissions, this user will be able to review, play, download, and/or delete all recordings they have access to. The user may only delete a recording if they are given the delete action specifically by management permissions. Call recordings are ordered by date and time and display the name of the user that was recorded.
Call Center Console
A user can access the Atlas platform call center console from the Boomea application. This enables a user to monitor the status of their queues and agents in real time. The interactive display allows the user to click on an agent and see their specific queue statistics. User can login, logout and set themselves away on the application. Admins can login, logout, and set agents away and ready in the application.
Agent and admin can also see callers waiting in the queue.
Contact Integration
Boomea Contacts the first milestone in our goal to provide the most robust UC product on the market. Contacts was the center point of all our communications, and this new feature integrates your contacts with Boomea. Current integrations are with the following providers:
o G-Suite (Google)
o Office365
This integration includes avatar images and contact sync between Boomea and your integration point. You may also choose not to integrate at all. In that situation, we provide the user the ability to upload a CSV file with their contacts and they may manage that list within the
Boomea interface. Integrating your contacts with Boomea provides a variety of new features and enhancements to Contact Management
o Click-2-Call your contacts
o Click-2-Email your contacts
o Outside Chat Messages
o Communication History
Contact Management
Boomea Contacts allows you to view and manage your contacts by syncing your contacts with your integration point. The integration includes avatar syncing. Any updates made to contacts in Boomea will be pushed up to your integration point. The converse also applies – any changes made to the contacts in your integration point will be pushed down to Boomea
Click-2-Call and Email
Using the contacts list, any contact that you have a telephone number assigned to, you can click the phone icon to initiate a call to that phone number. If the contact has more than one telephone associated to them, the contact information is expanded downwards to show you all their numbers and allow you to click on a specific number to call. Click-2-Email the contact’s email address. If the contact has more
than one email address associated to them, the contact information is expanded downwards to show you all their email addresses and
allow you to click on a specific email. The Boomea application will then automatically open your computer’s default email client and
pre-populate the ‘To’ field with their email address
Outside Messaging
With contacts integration, Boomea now allows you to chat directly with your contacts who also have the Boomea UC client! When a person outside your account initiates a chat with you, a chat access rule is presented as a question for you to answer regarding whether you want
to accept their request to chat, ignore the request for a set period of time, or block the user. This chat access rule is per-person and can be
changed at any time in your Boomea account settings. Imagine how this can help by chatting with support! When communicating with a
contact in another Boomea account as an outside message, you may also define whether you wish to share your chat presence with that contact
Meetings
Tasks
Boomea Tasks module is the first productivity tool created for the Boomea application. The tasks module allows a user to manage their personal and organizational tasks within the Boomea application. Features include:
• Personal and Organizational Task Management
• Task Delegation
• Task Sharing
• Task Activity Log
• Task Notifications
• Link UC Objects to Tasks for Quick Referencing and Centralization
For More information on Tasks please visit our website https://boomea.com/boomea-tasks
Mobile Tasks
The new tasks module wouldn’t be complete without a mobile app! Take your tasks on the road with Boomea Tasks Mobile available for iOS and Android platforms. Enjoy the same robust functionality on your mobile device as your desktop application.
What do you need to know?
If you’re currently using the Altas dashboard you need to contact us!!
Towner will ensure that we work together to make a smooth transition!
If the extreme weather conditions of recent years―historic droughts, devastating hurricanes and catastrophic wildfires, among others―have taught us anything, it’s that severe weather can strike at any moment, and every second counts. That’s why all organizations should have a strategic, well-tested emergency communication plan in place.
This article provides tips on how you can improve your emergency weather strategy by leveraging mass notification technology to optimize your communications processes to protect your people and assets.
Know the Terminology
To begin, make sure your team understands the different types of alerts issued by weather-related government agencies in your country. Typically, they include:
A watch: Sent when weather conditions are favorable for a specific type of event, such as a tornado or flooding. For example, a tornado watch would mean that a severe thunderstorm and tornadoes are possible. It does not mean a tornado will occur.
An advisory: Generally means a weather event is imminent, but not severe. For example, a winter weather advisory would be issued for several inches of snow in most areas. This is a notable occurrence, but not likely to cause long-term issues for most businesses and organizations.
A warning: Issued when a severe weather event is imminent. For example, a blizzard warning means a severe snowstorm is expected within the next 12 to 18 hours.
We recommend familiarizing your teams with the terminology, as well as relevant sirens or tones so they’re not alarmed should the forecast take a turn.
Determine Who Should Receive Severe Weather Notifications
If you haven’t already, determine who has decision-making authority within your organization, who needs to be informed of each weather condition and how they should proceed.
For example, you may decide that watches should go to executive team members and the facilities crew so they’re prepared to make contingency plans. You may choose to send advisories to all supervisors on premises because the weather event may require people to leave earlier than usual. You may choose to send warnings to all personnel because they may require people to seek shelter. Some situations, such as hurricanes and severe winter weather, often require management to determine if and when to close the facility or make arrangements for people to stay home.
Leverage Technology to Optimize Your Communications Plan
Next, determine how your organization will monitor and distribute information to the appropriate stakeholders. Most distributed recipient mass notification systems can send secondary notifications like e-mails or texts, but only advanced emergency mass notification systems are equipped to provide immediate and intrusive audio/visual alerts.
Advanced systems typically allow users to customize alerts so stakeholders receive a cohesive message from your organization. This helps establish trust and credibility with your recipients because they know the information they’re receiving is truly coming from your organization.
Providing ample notice can save lives, and automating weather alerts can provide the timely, effective information people need, without requiring one-off communications. Look for an emergency notification system that complies with all relevant regulations and integrates with trusted sources. As weather events develop, of course, you may want to add more personal and specific information based on your communications plan.
Test Your Systems & Conduct Drills
Conducting routine drills familiarizes personnel with existing procedures and acquaints them with new ones to ensure everyone understands what to do in a real weather emergency. They’re also helpful to identify process and system inefficiencies, arming leadership with valuable insight to fix issues right away.
Leverage a robust mass notification system with a scheduling solution like Mitel Revolution to plan drills in advance, so you can spend more time practicing and perfecting your emergency processes.
SYN-APPS
Syn-Apps is a leader in paging and mass notification solutions designed to improve business processes, increase safety and streamline communication. Since 2001, thousands of organizations across 35+ countries and a range of verticals – K-12, higher education, government, enterprises, retail, healthcare and more –have integrated Syn-Apps’ notification solutions with phones, paging systems, IP speakers and hundreds of other systems and services. Syn-Apps is also an OEM manufacturer of mass notification software for Fortune 500 global companies in the fire / life Safety and VoIP communications industry. For more information, visit syn-apps.com or call 1-866-664-6071.
Cloud contact center isn’t just a clever buzz phrase for big businesses anymore. Small Business Trends reports that Seventy percent of businesses either are planning to migrate their contact center to the cloud within the next year, or already have a cloud based contact center in place. This isn’t just a fancy fad: Market watch predicts that by 2024, that the $8.9 billion cloud contact center market will grow to more than $33 billion.
As cloud contact centers continue to become the way to do business, critical trends are surfacing that are promising a strong year in 2020.
2020 Cloud Contact Center Trends
A Legitimate Omnichannel Experience Offers More Robust Ways To Communicate.
The omnichannel experience is old hat in the contact center world, however many times not utilized to its fullest capabilities. A legitimate omnichannel experience enables customers to navigate effortlessly from one method of communications to another. When fully integrated and utilized as designed, omnichannel offerings ensure organizations can meet hyper evolving customer expectations.
As an example, MiCloud Connect Contact Center, enables your clients to easily interact with your agents, no matter what their channel of choice, without having to repeat their troubles or lose their information.
Training And Assistance Performed By A.I.
Gartner survey recently came out that Fifty-nine percent of organizations have already deployed AI, with many more organizations planning to implement AI projects during 2020. Gartner also forecasts that by 2021, AI interactions will handle 15 percent of all customer interactions. We’re just scratching the surface of how AI will transform cloud contact centers, and the customer experience. Major planned investments will enable AI to have an even bigger and badder role in how we interact with our customers over the next year.
This will include real-time training and coaching through virtual agent assist, or chatbots.
MiCloud Connect CX already handles this type of training. Speech analytics transcribes recorded conversations and uses AI to analyze key moments for coaching so your team can deliver better interactions. AI virtual agents also monitor conversations and present agents with relevant information that help them resolve customer questions more quickly and effectively.
The result? A more pleasant customer experience and a more effective interaction that’s on-brand and on-message. New agents handle calls like seasoned veterans in no time, and supervisors spend less time on training.
Impactful Analytics.
AI ensures more impactful and meaningful data analytics. Contact centers have been collecting data on customers since their inception, but the information’s useless if it’s not accurate, or properly analyzed and applied.
Natural language processing (NLP) interpret data and provide analysis around the “why” of customers contacting your company, ways you can improve your products and services and how you make information available to customers. This data enables you to move beyond contact center efficiency and focus on improving the overall customer experience. Since these insights are created in real-time, you can respond and adapt to customers’ preferences quickly, increasing loyalty while staying ahead of the competition.
Self-Service Is A Big Deal.
Customers often prefer to help themselves. They don’t want to get stuck in a queue or wait for a human agent – especially when they have a simple question about a product or service. Chatbots are the primary means of self-service, so it should be no surprise that the global chatbot market is expected to hit $5.63 billion by 2023, demonstrating a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of more than 34 percent over the 2018-2023 period.
Chatbots allow customers to get answers to basic questions and FAQs. They also free up human agents to focus on more complex queries and keep wait times down for those who really do need to speak to a live agent.
A key differentiator in 2020 will be the provision of chatbots that create a smooth transition when a customer needs live support. Smartbots route customers to an agent with the appropriate level of expertise and provide agents with a full history of the customer engagement. This saves customers from having to repeat themselves and enables agents to pick up exactly where the chatbot left off.
Expanded FAQs and video tutorials are other ways in which cloud contact centers will offer self-service in 2020, so businesses need to be sure they’re prepared to meet those demands, as well.
Contact Center Agents Move From Reactive To Proactive.
Integration with CRM systems provides cloud contact center agents with detailed customer data in real time. When customers call with an issue, agents have instant access to purchase histories and other relevant details. That allows them to take a more proactive role in addressing the customer’s issue.
MiCloud Connect CX is an example of a cloud contact center solution that integrates with your CRM so you can immediately assess customer information and create a more personalized interaction. Agents can even note the customer’s mood, which can trigger automated actions and help your business better prepare for future interactions. Personalization and customer sentiment help your business improve customer satisfaction levels and monitor them over time.
The Rise Of The Remote Contact Center Workforce.
The days of large rooms full of agents answering calls are disappearing. Cloud contact centers have ushered in the ability to maintain a remote contact center workforce, without the need to offshore calls to a third-party vendor. With a cloud contact center, agents can be dispersed throughout the country, putting them closer to your customers. The money saved on office space and other overhead can be applied toward hiring local talent that can provide localized service. “Homeshoring” improves customer satisfaction, and we expect this trend to continue in 2020.
There’s no doubt that 2020 will be an exciting time. Innovations in cloud contact center solutions will give your business the advantage it needs to remain competitive in a customer-driven world. And by putting these cloud trends at the center of your contact center plans, you’ll be sure to meet your customers’ expectations for a stellar experience.
When: March 19, 2019 4:00pm – 7:00pm Where: Tom’s Town Distilling Company, 1701 Main St., Kansas City, MO 6410
Mark your calendar to join Towner Communications and RingCentral for networking and thought-provoking conversation. You’ll also be entered in our raffle, with a chance to win a $200, $300 or $500 Amazon gift card!
Learn how your business communications can be improved with a comprehensive cloud phone system that integrates phone, video, meetings, and messaging in one reliable, easy-to-use solution.
Afterward, you’ll have the opportunity to go on a tour and see how Tom’s Town spirits are made, learn their history, and sample their award-winning spirits.
We look forward to seeing you there![/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]
How integrating multichannel cloud business
communications and applications drives innovation
and productivity across the enterprise.
January 2015 marked 100 years since the first cross-country telephone call. “Mr. Watson, are you there? Do you hear me?” This landmark event spawned an era in which analog voice calls became the primary communication tool for business. But times have changed; and although the telephone is still critical for building relationships, business communications now rely on a mix of voice plus everything from email to group chat. Additionally, knowledge workers have moved beyond simple desk phones to embrace mobile devices and softphones, as well as new desk phones that incorporate cutting-edge voice and video technology.
Plus, businesses haven’t just changed the way they communicate; they have also changed the way they work. This includes organizing workflows around business apps, including customer relationship management (CRM), human resource management (HRM), and enterprise resource planning (ERP). In recent years, many enterprises have moved these critical systems out of the data center and into the cloud. This includes not only software as a service (SaaS) models such as Salesforce, but also homegrown business applications developed by enterprise IT departments and deployed on public, private, or hybrid clouds.
However, many businesses find themselves struggling with on-premise phone systems that carry forward the limitations of decades-old technology. The result is a huge gap between communications platforms and essential business apps as well as the apps employees increasingly use for multiple modes of communications.
For example, while cloud-based apps, such as Gmail™, Microsoft Office 365™, and Salesforce® provide tremendous costsavings and are vital to greater efficiency and productivity, thus far, these systems have not been integrated with business communications. Communication data remains siloed from business app data, preventing management from having a unified view of the business. And with the exception of email, most modes of communication—such as voice calls, text, voicemail, fax, and online meetings—still require employees to perform tedious, error-prone manual data entry to log a conversation. The data stored in call logs is also typically isolated from other systems. For example, if a sales rep uses a call, text, or web meeting to communicate with a customer, critical information gained by the rep during the conversation can easily be lost or forgotten.
Cloud phone systems, on the other hand, grew up with mobile networks, new internet-based communications tools, and cloud business apps, making them ideally suited to today’s enterprises. This paper discusses how a robust, extensible cloud communications platform—which includes cloud APIs and SDKs for developers—can enable a new era of integrations between business communications and key business processes and workflows.
Seamlessly integrating communications into the new workspace
Today’s knowledge workers often use multiple devices—desktops, smartphones, and tablets—to communicate in a dizzying variety of ways, including voice calls, SMS, group SMS, instant messaging, email, and chat. In addition, business apps pile on additional channels of communications with customers, coworkers, and partners.
The constant chatter from all these devices and channels inundates employees. And to make matters worse, the highest volume communications are not necessarily the most urgent.
Matching IT technology with the multimodal way people work today requires a comprehensive enterprise business communications platform. Prebuilt and custom integrations in such a platform not only give employees a workspace with everything in one view, but can also surface the most important and urgent communications in the most appropriate way.
Previously, any company that wanted to create this type of seamless workflow between phone calls or other communication methods and their business applications discovered it was costly, complicated, and often impossible to achieve. This is primarily because of the inability of business apps to connect with closed, single-purpose phone systems. Gaps can also exist between the various apps commonly used by companies and among the various communications tools used by their employees. The advent of truly enterprise-class cloud communications systems now makes it possible to integrate business applications with business communications.
Leveraging cloud PBX for business communications
A cloud communications system overcomes many of the limitations inherent in legacy on-premise PBX systems to deliver greatly improved communications. For example, workers in one location can easily connect with colleagues in other offices using direct transfers and direct extension dialing. Once employees leave a location, calls automatically follow them wherever they go, and they can access voicemail, fax, conferencing, and all other company communications functions as seamlessly as if they were at the office.
A comprehensive cloud communications platform also delivers a range of new features and capabilities—such as a rich collaboration space that includes everything from online meetings to group chat.
Beyond email: group productivity with rich collaborations
As enterprise communications have evolved, the need for rich collaborations among teams, groups, and departments has become an essential capability. Collaboration tools such as audio and video conferencing, web meetings, chat, and SMS on desktop devices or smartphones allow employees to share their ideas and improve office productivity and efficiency, and they allow groups to work together more cohesively.
Empowered chat
As employees bring new forms of communication into the workplace, chat and SMS have become as much a part of a worker’s daily routine as voice calls. Until recently, text-based communications were not supported by enterprise IT departments and were not widely adopted in industries with major concerns regarding data security and compliance. The cloud changes how text-based communications can be supported. Enterprise-grade chat clients and support for SMS are now widely available on desktop and mobile devices. History logs as well as IT administration capabilities give control back to the CIO and help ensure security and compliance.
A variety of chat integrations can empower teams with richer collaboration. For example, advanced features and integrations between the phone system and instant messaging make it easy to escalate a group IM to a conference call. Or, the integration of empowered group chat into the phone system can help users increase productivity with direct access to features such as file sharing, tasks, notes, image annotations, video conferencing, and screen-sharing technology. Team
members also have the ability to assign tasks and integrate group meetings with the calendar.
Users can also link a chat meeting with other cloud services, such as Box, Dropbox™, Google, Evernote®, and JIRA®. This includes the ability to manage file sharing and storage that is relevant to the group collaboration.
Audio conferencing and online meetings
Audio conferencing integrated into a cloud phone system allows employees to connect with colleagues from a single conference bridge. Conference calling also enables mobile and remote workers to easily and cost-effectively work from any location and collaborate as if they were in the office. Online meetings give staff members the flexibility they need to share and work together at any time and from any location. Employees can deliver presentations from a computer, tablet, or smartphone. They can share their screens, web pages, and files from their devices or cloud storage accounts to add context and collaborate more effectively.
The trusted enterprise cloud platform
The RingCentral platform provides best-in-class cloud communications designed to serve today’s modern businesses. It delivers a completely integrated cloud communications solution that includes voice, SMS, fax, collaboration, and other powerful capabilities—with enterprise-grade security and carrier-grade reliability. This platform, which is based on a decade of R&D and is used by more than 350,000 businesses worldwide, also provides significant advantages, such as the ability to scale the phone system and manage it remotely without the need for staff with PBX experience at each business location.
Standard integrations with the most popular business apps
The platform includes prebuilt solutions that integrate the RingCentral Office® cloud phone system with popular cloud services such Microsoft Office 365, G Suite (a suite of tools that includes Gmail and Google Docs™), Salesforce, Zendesk®, and Dropbox.
The example in Figure 1 shows how RingCentral created a seamless integration with Office 365. RingCentral for Office 365 users can access a dialer, audio conferencing, Business SMS, and virtually the entire RingCentral Office feature set from within the email interface. Employees can make or receive calls and have text conversations on their mobile devices—all seamlessly. With more and more large organizations using Office 365 as their preferred email solution, this capability creates a natural, intuitive workflow.
With another integration example, RingCentral for Salesforce, Sales teams can make or receive calls, use Business SMS, or initiate a conference call without leaving their familiar work environment. Incoming callers are instantly matched to existing contact records, which are automatically displayed. The sales rep can also take notes while on a call and can choose to save those to the customer’s CRM record.
The first open, self-service cloud communications platform
This powerful platform is also open to developers, partners, and customers, allowing businesses to easily integrate robust communications capabilities into key enterprise applications. The RingCentral Connect Platform™ for developers (developer. ringcentral.com) offers a family of cloud APIs with a comprehensive SDK that integrates voice, SMS, and fax communications within important business processes.
With the RingCentral Connect Platform, developers, customers, and ISVs can now access the power of multimodal, realtime communications supported by extensive business logic and customer data management and reporting. This makes it easy for developers to not only enable their applications to send and receive calls and texts, but also to deeply embed communications functionality into the workflow of critical business applications.
For example, the RingCentral Connect Platform provides an SDK, tutorials, and developer support to create robust CTI integrations that seamlessly connect the RingCentral platform with Zoho, Salesforce, and other leading CRMs. The RingCentral Connect Platform also enables IT teams to create customized services that automate workflows, drive efficiency, and improve customer satisfaction. For example, a national locksmith service company connected its CRM and dispatch software with the RingCentral platform. This custom integration makes it possible to dispatch locksmiths via SMS. Customers then receive SMS notices that a locksmith is on the way. The integration includes an immersive custom workflow that connects to back-end business systems, allowing the agent to quickly match the locksmith with the customer.
A future-proofed business communications system
Now, companies can bridge the gap between disparate business systems or between systems and users by integrating this self-service cloud communications offering with any application. In addition, customers and ISV partners can easily create differentiated product offerings by incorporating next-generation communications features.
This is critical for businesses in today’s competitive environment, where the company with the best technology often wins. Looking at the seamless blend of services and communications in offerings such as Uber shows that these types of integrations can even disrupt entire industries. For enterprise IT departments looking to drive competitiveness through technology, the RingCentral platform offers an open path to staying competitive today and in the future.
What developers do with the power and capabilities of the RingCentral platform is limited only by their imaginations. For example…
A taxi or limousine service that uses RingCentral Office for voice dispatch could add automated SMS confirmations (for example, “Your car will arrive in two minutes”) to its custom dispatch software. Or, if a customer needed to meet a limo driver at the airport, the phone system could automatically send a photo of the driver by text or email.
An online electronics retailer could improve both sales and customer satisfaction by integrating a custom CRM system with real-time access to information. For example, a pop-up note based on the incoming caller ID could provide information about the customer’s prior orders and help the associate provide the caller with relevant information.
A medical office could integrate its back-end appointment system with patient contact information and automatically send appointment reminders via text message, and patients could reply to confirm or request a change.
An independent developer could create an integration that enables shoppers to connect with product reviewers. Reviewers wouldn’t even need to be online. They could receive questions via SMS, and their responses could post to the retailer’s website in real time.
Insights from communications metadata in the era of big data
Day-to-day business communications generate an invaluable stream of metadata. However, most of that data remains siloed, unstructured, or unavailable. For example, account managers often use mobile phones to continue working when they leave the office. But because many businesses rely on legacy, on-premise PBX systems, the records of those customer calls can easily be lost. With big data and the ability to derive valuable insights from analyzing that data, this lack of integration with a robust platform results in lost opportunities.
Metrics such as conversion, engagement, and utilization rates are not just important in web-enabled applications but also in real-time communications. IT managers, ISVs, and system integrators understand that these stats can drive intelligent decision making.
The RingCentral platform captures and stores a wealth of valuable data about your company’s or your customers’ communication behaviors (for example, when, where, and with whom they communicated), as well as levels of engagement, utilization, and success. This data even includes the steps that were taken before and after the engagement and which endpoints (desktop, web, mobile, etc.) were used. With RingCentral, application integrations can be easily customized to measure these business analytics and create reports or real-time dashboards.
Summary
Many knowledge workers today live in business apps such as Microsoft Office 365, G Suite, and Salesforce. They also rely on multiple communication apps—on multiple devices—to stay in touch with customers and collaborate with teams. These workers also expect their own devices and apps to integrate smoothly into the company phone system and enterprise business systems. All the while, IT must ensure reliability and security.
It takes a comprehensive enterprise-grade communications platform to satisfy these business needs. RingCentral provides an industry-leading UCaaS platform that offers a full suite of communications tools that are essential for today’s workers. More importantly, RingCentral integrates these tools with many of the most popular cloud apps, giving management a better view into the business and workers a better, more collaborative work environment. A robust developer’s platform also makes it easy for IT teams to create custom integrations and unique new service offerings.
This is the new work environment. From intelligence in the platform that can surface the most urgent messages to automatic dialing from within apps such as Office 365 or Gmail to empowered chat, by offering the strongest foundation for businesses to create new, disruptive service offerings, the RingCentral platform is the leading choice to equip your workforce for the challenges of tomorrow.
About RingCentral
RingCentral, Inc. (NYSE: RNG) is a global provider of cloud unified communications and collaboration solutions. More flexible and cost-effective than legacy on-premise systems, RingCentral empowers today’s mobile and distributed workforces to be connected anywhere and on any device through voice, video, team messaging, collaboration, SMS, conferencing, online meetings, contact center, and fax. RingCentral provides an open platform that integrates with today’s leading business apps while giving customers the flexibility to customize their own workflows. RingCentral is a leader in the 2017 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications as a Service Worldwide for the third consecutive year. RingCentral is headquartered in Belmont, Calif.
Arm your business with a Cloud customer experience that blows your competition out of the water and generates the sales and service results you’ve been dreaming of!
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Workforce management
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Customer surverys
Towner Communications Contact Center supports a wide range of survey methodologies for measuring customer satisfaction. Choose from Net Promoter® Score (NPS) surveys, Customer Effort Scores, general satisfaction ratings, and more.
