Telecom Reseller / Technology Reseller News

“It’s really around accelerating transformation,” says Greg Zweig, Director of Solutions Marketing at Ribbon Communications. Accelerating transformation is the message this year for Ribbon at Enterprise Connect 2023. At Ribbon, Zweig focuses on enabling secure Unified Communications for both cloud and premises. In this podcast, Zweig invites EC23 attendees to come visit the Ribbon booth (#427) where people will find Ribbon’s ideas, products and services that can enable transformation including cloud migration and much more.

Visit https://ribboncommunications.com/

Given the excitement created by ChatGPT, you must be thinking how Generative AI can benefit your enterprise.

ChatGPT uses GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformers) from OpenAI to provide you with a powerful conversational tool that can answer your questions in human-like English.  While ChatGPT has been trained with a ginormous public dataset, it has no knowledge of your reference data for Customer Support.  What you need is a Generative AI platform that is purpose- built for Enterprise Customer Support.

Generative AI Technology

Generative AI is part of Deep Learning technology involving large neural networks, called large Transformers, where the neural network is able to generate information such as summary from a text, answer to a question from a document or generate an image from a description.  GPT is the Generative AI technology from OpenAI.  Other companies such as Google and Anthropic also have very large Generative AI models such as PaLM and Claudia.

While Generative AI has been around for a while,  in the last 4 years due to advancement in hardware such as GPUs and TPUs, it is now possible to generate the summary or answer to a question with very high accuracy, since you can have a neural network now with billions and billions of nodes. For example, the GPT 3.5 model from OpenAI is trained on about 45 Terabytes of textual data and has 175 billion parameters to perform natural language tasks rivaling human performance.

How can Generative AI be used for Customer Support?

GPT technology (and other Generative AI technologies) can take a question and a document (plain text document) to generate an answer in natural English, if the question can be answered by the content of the document.  Otherwise, it returns “no answer”.  This can be used to provided sophisticated self-service for customers, along with solutions to boost the productivity of your support staff.

Gaps in Generative AI for the Enterprise

Consider a high tech or industrial enterprise with complex products.  The Reference Documentation probably includes 1000s to millions of documents -- in PDF, HTML, Microsoft Word/ Powerpoint/ Excel, Google Docs/ Slides/ Sheets, Relational Database Tables, and XML documents.  You probably have a lot of images, videos, and even drawings. Some of these documents can be 100s or even 1000s of pages, present in silos (web, Sharepoint, Google, Confluence, Salesforce, ServiceNow and more).  Not only that, often times the solution to a support query is scattered across multiple documents.

Given your reference data, in order to use Generative AI like GPT (or ChatGPT) to generate an answer for a support issue, you need to first generate a Shortlist of possible 10 – 20 Answer Segments (sections of reference documents which may have the answer) .  Without this Shortlist, no Generative AI platform will have any knowledge of your business and thus, will not be able to generate any answer.

Generating the Shortlist in real-time for a given support ticket or issue is complex, particularly given that you need high accuracy at a low cost to make it a viable solution.

Quark.ai, a Generative AI platform for Customer Support

Quark.ai’s Autonomous Support Platform is a Turnkey Pre-trained Generative AI solution for bringing efficiency to Customer Support through automation.  The platform is purpose- built for Customer Support, and therefore pre-trained with an extensive dataset for this space, enabling Quark.ai to onboard a customer rapidly in weeks.

To start with, we ingest all your reference data – structured data in relational databases, XML or CSV, unstructured data in PDF, HTML, Word, PPT, Google docs and more, and data from real-time applications like SAP.

Next, when a Support Query is input into this platform, Quark.ai processes it as follows –

It interprets the Support Query, which could be a support ticket, keywords or a natural language sentence, to determine the issue being discussed.

Collaboration Reinvented, Recognized

“SIPPIO does one thing, and we do one thing well,” says Dawn-Marie Elder, COO and General Manager of SIPPIO. “Enabling voice capabilities for Microsoft Teams and Zoom.” SIPPIO helps customers make and receive calls in the Microsoft Teams and Zoom apps. Their turnkey solution eliminates the effort and investment usually needed to set up and maintain a voice service so that users can make and receive calls, share files, chat, and join video conferences in their collaboration platform. Users can self-provision and manage their voice service through the SIPPIO app, while admins can set up new users, numbers, profiles, routing priorities, and call groups without needing to use PowerShell code. In this short podcast, Elder discusses how SIPPIO’s solutions achieved recognition in this week's Innovation Showcase at Enterprise Connect 2023.

Visit https://www.sippio.io/

by Gary Audin

Microsoft Teams is commonly and frequently deployed for Unified Communications and Collaboration (UC&C) applications. You also know that the Teams cloud based service will be integrating with multiple vendors and providers to implement an end-to-end collaboration experience.

The reality is that UC&C technologies and network accesses are composed of multiple vendors and services. This makes it difficult to monitor and maintain a high quality session environment. The negative experiences quickly become costly when workers can’t effectively collaborate with their co-workers, customers, and partners.

This 7 minute EDUbrief, “Delivering UX for Multi-vendor UC Microsoft Teams” with Gary Audin and sponsored by Vyopta, explores the problems when managing UC&C sessions using Teams. This educational EDUbrief covers what Teams does and does not perform in its management portfolio especially the management of other vendors’ products and services. It shows that leveraging insights about your technology, spaces, and users ensures exceptional collaboration experiences.

Vyopta, the sponsor of this EDUbrief, is a leader in digital collaboration user experience management and has helped 40 million people collaborate better. Its Technology and Workspace Insights have helped identify and address over 9 million issues. Hundreds of organizations worldwide spanning 20+ industries use Vyopta to monitor 6 million endpoints and over 20 billion meeting minutes a year.

Is the industry voice in step with what customers actually want? That is the question posed by Iain Sinnott, Head of International Carrier Sales at Enreach for Service Providers. In this podcast, Iain reflects on observations from recent industry events — such as Barcelona’s Mobile World Congress and London’s Cloud Comms Summit — as well as conversations with service providers. Topics covered in this podcast include the current industry’s focus on ‘mobile-first’ and how, for the Nordics, that is a history lesson: ground already well-trodden. Iain also talks about the increasing divergence of what corporations and SMEs want, and how the industry needs to react. Finally, Iain explains how Enreach is working with SMEs, including its emphasis on white label options and service providers retaining the customer relationship and visibility.

Visit https://enreach.com/en

If you want to really know what is going on in telecommunications, ask the companies that are installing and removing equipment on the towers. Brant Carter, Director of Industry Products with Sitetracker, brings Don Witt of The Channel News, a TR publication, up to speed on Tower deployments.

Brant Carter

It is a complete process and Sitetracker has the personnel and software to manage it from onsite delivery, installation, management, maintenance and beyond – globally for both the wireless and wireline sectors. Sitetracker excels with volume projects that can be replicated in multiple locations creating consistency in execution.

Sitetracker;s digital transformation is being driven by productivity improvements needed by organizations. It is accomplished by connecting multiple departments including planning, engineering, construction and operations teams. They all use a common data source which helps eliminate mistakes, reduces cost and time per project.

Listen in as Brant demonstrates how Sitetracker can streamline the Tower operation process!

About: A global software company committed to helping organizations build, deploy, and maintain the next generation of critical infrastructure faster and more profitably.

Accelerate the transition to a fully connected and sustainable future.

Sitetracker helps companies accelerate growth by empowering teams to operate more efficiently. Their unmatched usability and intelligent forecasting capabilities help you manage numerous projects and assets with precision.

For more information, go to: https://www.sitetracker.com/

Family owned, family run supplier combines personal touch with global reach

“Basically, anyone who needs entperise parts,” says Major Jan of iTEKDATA (ITD), a global company that supplies the IT market with products originally manufactured by HP, Dell, Cisco, and IBM. “We should be on speed dial for a lot of companies,” adds Major. In this podcast Major tells us about his company’s ability to ship needed parts and equipment, often very quickly, to companies in the market and to enterprises, when needed. With locations in the US, Canada and the UK, the company is in a great position to ship needed parts, in many cases, with next day delivery. The company maintains inventory and is a go-to resource for many firms. Major relates his almost thirty-year journey in the market, and his connections to the ASCDI in the past, and today as an active ASCDI member.

Visit https://itekdata.com/

StrongLink, a provider of autonomous large-scale data management and archive solutions, has released enhanced cloud storage support with specific functionality that allows organizations to gain more value and flexibility from cloud storage. In this podcast, Mike Mitsch, Technology Sales, Marketing and Alliance Leadership at StrongLink, walks us through a short slide deck where we learn about StrongLink’s ability to manage data across any storage and StrongLink’s ability to apply advanced on-prem storage operations to Cloud Storage providers. Mike discusses S3 IBR an Immutable Feature that allows StrongLink to protect against data deletion by safeguarding data written to S3 Cloud Storage providers.

Mike also offers an interesting overview of data, data management and data management in the era of edge data with the explosion of data being generated by innumerable devices consumers and businesses use on the edge. Cloud storage vendors now number 350 companies, but many of these offer approaches that might be limiting by so called “lock in strategies”. Mike discusses the market picture and then offers insight and a path forward, for the TR partner, MSP, carrier and large enterprise communities.

Visit https://stronglink.com/

Combining notifications, conversations, engagements results in more sales, better CX

“We’re really trying to have that hybrid experience, come online,” says Sean Whitley, VP of Sales at Mitto, describing how conversational commerce creates a dynamic human element to the customer experience when shopping. In this podcast we learn about new channels for ecommerce growth, namely social media, and chat apps, and how brands can use conversational commerce to deliver unique experiences and drive conversions. “You want the same experience with your brand,” adds Whitley, noting how conversational commerce not only helps in a retail process but also in creating a consistent brand experience. We learn how these technologies not only deliver great CX, but they also result in more sales. The use of notification tactics can, for example, reach back out to consumers to look at abandoned shopping carts, where research shows how consumers returning to their abandoned carts, often, make a purchase. We learn how Mitto uses powerful AI tools to help brands connect with their customers. Conversational commerce aims to bring the previously personal element of shopping to the digital realm with the help of new communication channels – such as SMS, WhatsApp Business, Facebook Messenger and Instagram. These are great channels for customer support and marketing, but now they’re also great for conversions. A customer engaging with either a live agent, AI bot, or hybrid of both can have questions answered in a two-way setting and eventually purchase directly within the dialogue.

Visit www.mitto.ch

“We do all of it,” says ICAS President Matthew Bonfitto. “It’s important because it give the client one point of contact, instead of discussing with many different vendors. We can take care of a project from start to finish. It’s very seamless, and there’s continuity, which is very important.” In this podcast, Bonfitto, takes us on a journey of over fifty years, establishing a cable assembly house in 1979 to working on IoT projects today. Even as we migrate to a cloud technology world, network infrastructure remains central to the functioning of major enterprise. American Express, New York City Schools, Morgan Stanley the MTA, and New York State Courts are among the many private sector, public sector, and NGO entities that ICAS serves. “It doesn’t matter what size, we get the job done,” says Bonfitto, adding that ICAS views every job and every customer as important. “We make sure everything is up and running, you call ICAS, and we take care of it.”

Visit https://www.icascorp.com/