Telecom Reseller / Technology Reseller News

Providing customers with convenience and consistency is key to earning their business and long-term loyalty to your brand.  More than this, the conversational experiences you provide can be the competitive differentiator that sets your business apart and positions you for success. In this podcast, Rob McDougall, CEO of Upstream Works discusses ways in which organizations can use customer engagement strategies to differentiate their brand – including the effective use of emerging channels, AI and machine learning. He emphasizes the importance of a customer-centric approach that meets customers on the channels they’re using, with consistent and personalized service.  McDougall shares use cases for Bots and AI, and describes the impact on agents in the contact center.  He explains one of the nuances of bot escalations to agents: “Just like with a live transfer, the agent needs to pick up and take over the conversation with no gaps – and this means knowing who the customer is, their history, and a view to everything that happened with the bot conversation.” McDougall discusses the value of good data, and that having access to this data can power opportunities for personalized, proactive, and predictive conversations.  We learn about how Upstream Works for Finesse with its flexible conversational experience capabilities can help businesses ensure customer loyalty now and in the future.

More at: https://www.upstreamworks.com/

“We don’t create value, we uncover and connect to it,” says Mitch Friedman, a Managing Partner at Value Selling Associates. In this podcast, reporting on a program recently offered to Wildix partners, we learn about how MSPs can avoid price driven sales and move towards a product differentiated, less price dependent sales process and model. Robert Cooper, Country Manager of Wildix Inc. discusses Wildix’s ongoing effort to up the game for the partner community, by changing the mindset from price to value. Friedman outlines what that can actually mean by further defining solutions selling and outlining better strategies such as better probing of reported and unreported customer challenges and then being able to effectively solve problems customers are aware of, and possible customer work process that could be improved. In this podcast we hear about how we build a value centered sales process.

Learn more at www.wildix.com

In this podcast, Richard Kasslack, Vice President of Sales, North America says that there’s a disconnect between expectation and reality. Cloud-based voice services are known for having issues and many organizations are experiencing quality and other issues. In other words, the cloud might bring costs that weren’t planned “We all thought the Quality problems were because of the WAN Connection. SD-WAN was developed in an attempt to improve connections between device and application,” says Kasslack. “This was a band-aid solution - still did not address the main issue - the connection from the De-mark to the Desktop.” Kasslack says that we should look at the Centrex model and that Cloud vendors need end-to-end control of their service. Kasslack discusses a remedy, saying how cloud providers are leveraging NVT Phybridge’s PoLRE, and how PoLRE can transform existing voice network into separate and secure IP platform for a cloud-based communication solution.

Visit our website: www.nvtphybridge.com

John Macario, Vice President of Global Channel Marketing, reviews the result of the extensive survey with Don Witt of The Channel Daily News, a TR publication. The survey was conducted with decision makers of voice, data and cloud services for companies from 5-10 employees up to thousands of employees totaling 4800 companies in 23 countries.

Subjects covered in the survey include:

Infrastructure

Whose voice services are they using today

Use of Video Conferencing

How is IP Managed

Have you transitioned your phone

systems from a legacy system to IP?

John Macario

Ultimately, the survey provided information on IP adopters who, what, when, why and for non-IP adopters – learned their level of understanding about IP or possible misconceptions.  What would non-IP adopters look for when they make the switch? What do they look for in a service provider?

Fifty percent of North American companies with more than 100 employees identify as early adopters with another 20% identified as fast followers. Companies with 20 employees identify as early adopters with the remaining identifying as early mainstream. Companies with 21 to 100 employees had an IT person on staff 51% of the time.

The information reveals some counterintuitive facts as well as a great deal of information that will enable vendors and resellers to tweak their marketing material to better target their prospective customers. Listen in for some great information.

John is currently in Europe launching a five-city tour discussing the report results.  The report will be a public report but has not yet been uploaded to their website. Shortly after their return, they will start a North American tour followed closely by Asia Pacific.

For decades, enterprises have struggled to unify their locations, their workflows, and their cultures.  Unfortunately, many legacy communication solutions can't scale across locations, don't fully engage remote users or offer the tools employees need to collaborate. Ribbon is different, their solutions already support organizations that span the globe; universities, healthcare facilities, government agencies, financial institutions and more. They don't have different solutions for different deployment scenarios. Deploy Ribbon solutions in your network, in a private cloud or as a service from their Kandy Business cloud.

For more information, go to: https://ribboncommunications.com/ or https://ribboncommunications.com/products/enterprise-products/uc-platforms

by Gary Audin

Organizations in all industries are moving to hosted IP solutions for communication, security, and other IoT applications. However, many organizations are faced with challenges as they attempt to effectively connect each IP endpoint to the application in the Cloud. The core issue has nothing to do with the endpoint or the application; the issue is LAN topology and determining the best way to connect each IP endpoint to the D-mark (router) on-site, before connecting to the off-site application.

John Croce, CEO of NVT Phybridge (www.nvtphybridge.com) and Gary Audin discuss the challenges that organizations face as they modernize to hosted IP solutions. John covers how Frost & Sullivan’s Modern LAN Principles enhance traditional LAN design philosophies to specifically address the challenges of modernizing to hosted IP and the Internet of Things. In this comprehensive EDUcast, you will learn the challenges that arise from applying traditional LAN design thinking to support hosted IP and how applying Modern LAN design will improve the performance, security, and reliability of your Cloud-based system.

What you will learn in this EDUcast:

The history and purpose of traditional LAN design

Traditional LAN design thinking vs Modern LAN design thinking

How to effectively support your hosted IP solution

Modern LAN Principle #1: Start with the endpoint in mind

New Power over Ethernet switch innovations

LAN topology comparisons

Success stories

Developed by Frost & Sullivan’s industry experts, the Modern LAN provides the modern enterprise, consultants, and resellers with a revolutionary set of new best practices to accommodate the impact of hosted IP solutions and the Internet of Things on the local area network. Download the Modern LAN white paper here: http://themodernlan.org/

NVT Phybridge www.nvtphybridge.com is a global leader in Power over Long Reach Ethernet (PoLRE®); leveraging Modern LAN principles and SmartPathPoE™ technology to make IP connections simple, secure and cost-effective. The NVT Phybridge CHARIoT series of award-winning switches help customers modernize to an IP-based network, transforming their new or existing infrastructure into an IP path with power. NVT Phybridge is a North American-based technology company with global reach dedicated to practical innovation, producing innovative and affordable solutions for over 24 years, with technology that is currently supporting millions of IoT endpoints.

Today’s customer uses multiple communication channels to engage with a brand, and they expect to connect on any channel that they choose – and the brands that the customer interacts with need to support that expectation with engagement that is continuous and consistent across those channels. In this podcast Rob McDougall of Upstream Works discusses the connected customer experience and what’s required for successfully transforming your engagement model to meet customer demand. According to McDougall, the key to offering connected experiences is making sure that the service you offer is consistent across those channels. McDougall explains, “a customer might start with an email, try self-service, switch to chat and escalate to voice - all within one transaction – so flexibility and consistency in the contact options you offer is key.” He describes the most common challenges organizations face when attempting to come up with a cohesive strategy, and outlines the impressive benefits that can be realized when it’s done right. And how does one get it right? According to McDougall, a new approach is required – one that abolishes information silos and ensures that there is flexibility to adapt to a changing customer landscape. That approach also needs to support customer self-service with agents who are equipped with proactive service capabilities as well as tools and knowledge for handling escalations. We learn about how Upstream Works for Finesse with its distinctive omnichannel capabilities takes the focus off the channel and puts it instead on the customer experience itself, ensuring that the contact center can constantly evaluate, reimagine, and reshape CX.

More at https://www.upstreamworks.com/

“We continue to drive a customer focused approach to our products and our technology as we move it forward,” says Russ Currie, Vice President of Enterprise Strategies. “We constantly work with our customers to understand their use cases, their problems and then bring that into the product and continue to evolve and make our product better, and really provide a good investment protection for our customers as they grow their environment.” In this podcast we hear a broad overview of Netscout, and Netscout’s nGenius service assurance solutions and NETSCOUT Arbor Edge Defense (AED) software and hardware. Currie discusses how Netscout, a pioneering company, has stayed ahead of the evolving enterprise network, with products that can provide insight into a multi-cloud environment. We learn about Netscout’s offering for the Cisco community.

Visit www.netscout.com

50%. According to the FCC, one in two calls coming into businesses of every size are now robocalls. The calls impact large and small organizations, wasting time, impacting productivity and making it difficult for firms to distinguish legitimate traffic from spam. “We are on a mission to dramatically reduce robocalls,” says Chuck French, Chief Growth Officer of Mutare. In this podcast we learn how Mutare, a familiar name in the voice and UC community, is about to release the Mutare Spam Filter on July 8. According to French, the filter blocks 4 of 5 robocalls by running each call against a white list, a black list and a dynamic robocall list. French discusses the details of how the filter functions and how this is a pioneering step in the battle against the proliferation of these nuisance calls. French also says that,” Voice mail done properly is strategic,” as he makes the case for a new approach to what French describes as a vital communication tool. French reminds listeners that human communication is optimal when it’s real time, person to person. French reports that at CiscoLive, attendees did not need much convincing about the urgency of the issue. The filter is arriving at the right moment.

Visit www.mutare.com

“Every sixty-seconds, we’re actually sending very specially crafted information up and down that network, to experience that network, and come back and give a pre-emptive and pro-active score of the health and the quality of that network,” says Matt Stevens, Co-Founder and CEO of AppNeta. “And if at any point that network quality drops below what the end user experience level as determined by the business, we can then take the next order and automatically escalate it using AI to drive diagnostics to find out where and why that problem is happening, in most cases allowing our customers to mediate the problem before the end user ever has to open a ticket and make a call…” In this podcast Stevens describes the issues confronting networking for enterprises and then discusses AppNeta’s approach.  AppNeta is a network performance monitoring solution that delivers deep, actionable, end-to-end network performance data from the end-user perspective. AppNeta’s solution is a SaaS based.

Visit https://www.appneta.com/press-room/appneta-announces-2019-state-of-enterprise-it-report/

More at www.appneta.com.

Just a little over three years ago, CallCabinet was boasting recording 10,000 calls. Today, according to CEO Ryan Kahan, the number of recorded calls is in the billions. In this podcast, recorded at CiscoLive 2019, we learn about the call recording’s company’s ascent from niche player to a strongly favored choice across a number of different UC segments. Ron Romanchick discusses the new offering of voice analytics that allows for better understanding of individual calls, compliance and even offers insight into caller/customer and agent mood. Kahan discusses how the firm has built enterprise and channel followings and now has gained traction among carriers and service providers. Atmos, CallCabinet’s flagship product, works on-prem Cisco, and a number of other OEMs, and also interacts Skype and BroadSoft, offering on-prem and subscription models.

Visit www.callcabintet.com