Telecom Reseller / Technology Reseller News

The Problem with Unregulated Call Labeling Analytics Engines, Numeracle Podcast: Verified Identity directly to call recipients without relying on intermediaries.

Even in the shadow of the STIR/SHAKEN effort and several public and private sector initiatives, illegal robocalling continues to bedevil legitimate use cases, legitimate corporate, government and NGO operators of outbound calling operations. Numeracle is an industry pioneer and leader with actionable solutions for legal callers that prioritizes their calling identity as the foundation to restoring trust in the voice channel and to their calls by removing barriers, like improper spam labels, from harming their phone numbers. In this podcast, we visit with Keith Buell, General Counsel and Head of Global Public Policy, who walks us through his organization’s comments to the FCC and offers us a better understanding of Numeracle’s vision: Verified Identity directly to call recipients without relying on intermediaries.

“We’ve gone from an industry where carriers have a duty to deliver calls with 99.999% accuracy to an industry that favors overzealous blocking and labeling without consequence to the blocker,” says Buell.

On August 9th, 2023, Numeracle filed comments in response to the FCC’s Seventh Report and Order, Eighth Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, and Third Notice of Inquiry in the matter of ‘Advanced Methods to Target and Eliminate Unlawful Robocalls.’ A central point, explains Buell: “The FCC should not allow the AEs to insert themselves into the call flow, regardless of whether the call originator or recipient wants them there, and give the AEs carte blanche to make errors and then charge to fix those errors.”

Numeracle has offered to provide Verified Identity data to help the analytics with an additional vetted source by which to identify good actors apart from the bad.

Numeracle is an industry pioneer and leader with actionable solutions for legal callers that prioritizes their calling identity as the foundation to restoring trust in the voice channel and to their calls by removing barriers, like improper spam labels, from harming their phone numbers. Numeracle's Entity Identity Management™ (EIM) platform puts enterprise brands, BPOs, and service providers in direct control of their identity, which we vet and verify. Our EIM platform can also be used to manage branded communications, to improve call reputation with blocking and labeling prevention and spam label remediation, and we provide visibility into call display to ensure brand identity is presented as intended, with transparency and consistency. Our KYC-based identity vetting and verification is the cornerstone of the platform; developed in support of evolving federal regulations and telecom standards.

Visit www.numeracle.com 

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Role AI plays in the contact centers and why human involvement is critical, Cisco looks to AI to improve EX, cut agent churn by improving human involvement

“The concern has been ‘Will AI replace my job?’,” Lorrissa Horton, SVP/GM and Chief Product Officer and Collaboration at Cisco. Horton recognizes that this might occur where the agent is still doing the simplest tasks. “The reality is that where we see the human value is where it’s not simple Q&A but actually these complex tasks and the complex conversations that require empathy, that require knowing the concern that your customer has and that where it will be handled very differently than a virtual agent.”

“I think we will see agents turn into, basically, knowledge workers.” Horton sees AI as freeing agent time from some of the repetitive tasks that take their toll on mental health and morale. She sees a future for agents as holding a more stimulating, rewarding, and interesting workload: from task work to answer seeking. Even the metrics will change, from handle time to customer satisfaction.

It has been the year that AI broke into the popular imagination as the next great disruptive force, fear over job loss and human displacement has often outpaced optimism over a newfound tool to remedy problems. In this podcast Horton a fresh take. As we discuss the role AI plays in the contact center, Horton makes the case that AI can help improve employee experience, as AI is deployed to manage the simpler bits of customer traffic.

Expanding on Cisco’s vision of the new contact center, that was presented at Cisco Live 2023, Horton offers a vision of very different environment than what has come before in this space. Using Ai, she describes a place where people are learning from people, where best approaches and practices to challenges are shared, but in an environment that is agent and employee friendly. Hortons notes that when we look at health care and finance, which are already a very large share of contact center activity, human to human conversations will remain central, while new AI technologies will help agents learn, and learn. AI, CPaaS, stepped up use of texting, will transform the contact center, as we have known it.

Visit www.Cisco.com

Cisco Webex, Contact Center https://www.webex.com/customer-experience/contact-center.html

View on YouTube

https://youtu.be/Vj8-P09AVuQ?si=cOTdCox-U4Y0NU4u

“They have a one stop shop, in terms of managing their requirements,” says, Ardavan Nawaby, Founder & CEO of E-MetroTel. “E-Metrotel provides a graceful migration for customers,” Ardavan continues. In a crowded and busy UCaaS market and in a communications landscape that’s rich with choice, E-MetrotTel distinguishes itself by, not only offering the widest possible set of migration choices, but also paths of migration that reflect actual need verses a forced set of choices. Customers can keep their legacy desktop phones or plan to change them out at their own pace. They can begin to move to soft phone options and mobility, and again at the pace that the customer needs. Partners can choose for their customers either an on prem or cloud solution, reflecting a choice that is often not available now. Meanwhile the company offers a simple single point of contact to get whatever product or service is needed: video conferencing, collaboration as well as traditional telephony capabilities. “You can migrate one cabinet at a time, instead of taking out the whole PBX. You can maximize your investment overtime.” Hospitals, government, supermarkets are among the many types of environments that continue to have a specific communication solution. Partners looking for new opportunities might look to E-MetroTel for new conversations with these and more verticals.

Visit www.e-metrotel.com

Building a new voice network in Namibia and beyond, A model for rural communications transformation, Webinar offered from TelcoBridges, Jerasoft and Paratus Africa, A model for rural communications transformation

Alan Percy of TelcoBridges discusses a unique story of a customer that recently built out a voice network, from scratch. “You normally don’t get that opportunity, as a network engineer, a designer, to build a network from scratch,” says Percy. In this podcast, we get a look at a recent webinar where we learn from Ricky Innes, Manager of Voice at Paratus Group, in Namibia, about that story.

“It is an exact model of what we envision the cloud communications community undertaking as they do this network transformation for service providers, especially in the rural parts of North America. Start with fiber, build IP infrastructure onto of that fiber, and then layer on top of it a voice network.”

About the webinar

When building new VoIP networks, capturing call details about subscriber traffic is critical for billing and settling with interconnect operators. In the webinar, you will learn the benefits of a fully integrated solution, leveraging ProSBC with Jerasoft billing software to reduce billing errors and settlement effort.

Watch to hear from Ricky Innes, Manager of Voice at Paratus Africa as he shares their story in building a new voice network in Namibia and beyond. Speakers: - Alan Percy, CMO at TelcoBridges - Ricky Innes, Manager of Voice at Paratus Group - Mike Stukalin, VP of Sales at JeraSoft.

More TelcoBridges

Visit TelcoBridges

Watch the webinar

Watch the podcast below

Telcos and Techcos are Blending as Both Look to Capitalize on New Revenue Streams: iconectiv is helping telcos and techcos embrace this shift, and overcome key challenges that must be addressed in the process

TR Publications Weekend Listen

In today’s digital world, telecommunications and technology companies are starting to blend, as both identify new revenue streams and business opportunities. In this podcast, Peter Ford, Executive Vice President at iconectiv, tells us how his company is helping telcos and techcos embrace this shift, and overcome key challenges that must be addressed in the process.

“This is a significant shift. Historically, telcos and techcos have had differing go-to-market strategies,” says Ford. “As the two blend, telcos need to adapt their organizational culture to be more agile and innovative, while techcos need to understand the complexities of managing and maintaining a reliable network infrastructure, which may not be their core expertise.”

iconecitv is a trusted partner of the communications ecosystem, dedicated to keeping people connected, businesses running and commerce flowing. This includes making sure incoming and outgoing phone calls and messages are verified and identified, and that communications service providers can trust the information in their systems and network, and ultimately, operate as cost effectively and efficiently as possible.

www.iconectiv.com

x-hoppers creates a market

“We’re not here to provide software,” says Tim Truelove, Country Manager Americas of Wildix. “We’re here to find solutions.” In this podcast Truelove is joined by Ian Rowan, Country Manager UK as they explore the Wildix solution for retailers, x-hoppers. According to Rowan, x-hoppers takes on the real-world challenges facing retailers: how to offer differentiated service to create refreshed instore in an online shopping environment, theft, staffing and training.

In one use case, Rowan describes a small retailer who adopted x-hoppers. If the same company had adopted a regular UCaaS solution, it would have been a $20 a month opportunity. X-hoppers, delivering a sophisticated set of tools to this same retailer, including AI powered solutions is instead delivering a $700 a month opportunity back to the MSP. X-hoppers solves the price contrition problem by simply blasting out the confinement of UCaaS, where the MSP is in a market all their own, offering a unique solution set.

x-hoppers is a communication headset and SaaS retail solution that puts a retailer one jump ahead. With x-hoppers, you get the best of communications software, SaaS solutions for retail and retail analytics, all available through an easy-to-use wireless headset. Here’s how easy it is to hop on board with x-hoppers:

All headsets are linked to a single voice channel

Each headset starts off muted by default to prevent chatter

Push the Call button once to talk to colleagues, and push again to mute

The main voice channel also issues audio alerts from incoming calls and customer call points

Answer calls routed to that headset by pushing the Hook key

While on a call, push the Hook key again to return to the retail voice channel, then push a third time to return to the call

x-hopper for Retail: https://www.wildix.com/x-hoppers-team-communication-headsets/

AI, mobility, and other intensifying trends in technology use are all projected to climb dramatically, just now data centers are competing for water and energy, often with other consumers near their location. Meanwhile cost and other environmental concerns are escalating. In this podcast, Dr. Kelley Mullick, Vice President of Technology Advancement and Alliances of Iceotope, tells us about how her company and how precision cooling and precision engineering comes together to deliver a solution that very accurately delivers cooling to where it’s needed. The amount of energy required is dramatically less and the data center is no longer depending on potable water.

“You’re extending the life of your IT equipment,” says Mullick. “You’re in an environment where there’s a much more evenly applied solution.” We learn that part of the ROI is not only considerably lower power (an possibly water) costs, but that the actual equipment will last longer.

Iceotope's chassis-level precision immersion cooling solutions are engineered to cool the whole IT stack, in every use case, from Hyperscale to the Extreme Edge. By removing the need for fans and air-cooling infrastructure, Iceotope’s technologies operate in near silence — bringing game-changing reduction in energy and water consumption, and significant cost reductions in the design, build and operation of data centers. For more information, visit: www.iceotope.com.

WhatsApp is the new main street, high street, or shopping mall. Two billion consumers, twenty-four hours a day, and the app’s new business API enables businesses to engage customers on that app, directly. The services we have grown to expect online, to show, to view a catalog and to talk to customer support, are what businesses should be gearing up to offer on mobile apps. Some businesses have been there for a while, some not as much. The online widget I now a chat, and the customer is expecting a response, at any time of their convenience. In this podcast, Gaurav Kachhawa, the Chief Product Officer at Gupshup,  a high-scale, conversational AI platform. We learn how quickly the AI platform learns responses to 80% of expected questions, how it learns from your own corporate website and how it hands off conversations to human agents, as needed, with complete context and background. Kachhawa explains how this company’s approach to automation offers what he calls “very simple steps of getting companies ready for this age of automation and AI.”

Gupshup.io is the leading conversational engagement platform for marketing, commerce, and support automation. Gupshup’s automation solutions enable 45,000+ brands across India, Latin America, Europe, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and the United States to deliver better customer experience, and increased revenue while saving costs. Citibank, AkzoNobel, Khan Academy, Unilever, MPL, Netflix, Flipkart, and Ola are a few of its leading clients. With a single messaging API for 30+ channels across voice, text, and chat, the conversational engagement platform powers over 10 billion messages per month. Valued at $1.4 bn, the company has marquee investors such as Tiger Global, Fidelity Management and Research Co. LLC, and others on its cap table. For more details, please visit: www.gupshup.io.

Goal of setting information and communications technology (ICT) specific standard for global supply chain security

“This standard is intended to allow a network operator to assess the security hygiene of its vendors,” says Mike Regan of TIA (Telecommunications Industry Association). According to Regan, the SCS 9001 standard takes a very broad overview of the vendor, “…how they manage their products, from conception, through their entire lifecycle, to disposition,” Regan adds. SCS 9001 is more than just a standard, it is a complete cybersecurity and supply chain security management system that verifies trusted ICT providers and suppliers for businesses, governments, and consumers.

Developed by TIA QuEST Forum's Supply Chain Security Working Group, the standard provides guidance for key components of supply chain security:

Secure software development

Validation methods for ensuring software ID and source traceability.

Product security

Governmental requirements on source of origin and transparency of internal controls

“We don’t think you can truly have a secure product without assuring that the supply chain has also been pursued with security at top of mind,” says Regan.

We hear about SCS 9001 in the context of the administration’s efforts, with the U.S Cyber Trust Mark program to be a “good housekeeping seal” for ensuring IoT devices have passed a certain cyber security threshold.

Visit https://tiaonline.org/what-we-do/tia-quest-forum/working-groups/supply-chain-security-working-group/

“It goes all the way back to Microsoft OCS,” says Greg Zweig, Director, Solutions Marketing at Ribbon Communications. Ribbon, a company whose deep telephony roots and IT DNA reach back to the beginnings of telecommunications. The brands and product lines that went into the making of Ribbon, have been aligning with Microsoft’s communications footprint almost from the software giant’s earliest entries into the market. In July, Ribbon announced that Beanfield is leveraging Ribbon Connect for Operator Connect to facilitate and enhance its deployment of Operator Connect for Microsoft Teams.

An as a Service (aaS) solution, Ribbon Connect for Operator Connect offers portal-based administration tools that enable service providers to simplify selling, provisioning, and billing of telecom services, making it easier for businesses to transition from legacy telephony services to Microsoft Teams Phone. Ribbon Connect dramatically reduces the integration efforts typically required to enable Operator Connect by providing pre-assembled API integration, sales enablement, and a multi-tier portal. The Ribbon Connect portfolio is built with Ribbon’s proven carrier-grade security products and services, that are already trusted and deployed in many of the world’s largest telecom networks.

In this podcast, Zweig walks us through the announcement with Beanfield. Zweig offers a deeper look at Ribbon Connect for Operator Connect. We also learn more about the deep technology connections between Ribbon and Microsoft and the literal presence of Ribbon SBCs in Microsoft’s R&D labs. “When they’re doing testing, they’re actually testing their products against ours, with every release cycle.”

Visit www.rbbn.com

Beanfield Simplifies Teams Phone Integration with Ribbon Connect for Operator Connect