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Technology and customer service go hand-in-hand. Without the right technology, you lack the ability to effectively connect with customers and track those interactions. When your employees are spending a significant amount of time on the phone dealing with customer complaints about your phones systems, you have an issue that demands quick resolution.

Have you reached the point where you need to start re-architecting tried and true WAN services like MPLS or point-to-point Metro Ethernet? My guess is yes. In many cases, the branch and WAN can no longer keep up. As a result, many organizations are suffering from:

Conversations abound with talk of the BOT (a web robot that automates tasks) takeover in our customer care practices, but how will the human element evolve? If in just a few short years, 85% of interactions will be handled by BOTs, where does that leave the other 15%? In this post, I will focus on the 15%, its importance within our customer care ecosystem, and how you can ready yourself for the impact this will have on your organization.

Last week, I introduced SIP and wrote about the use cases around adjunct connectivity and routing. This week, I'll share use cases around SIP trunks and endpoints. Let's get to it!

According to Gartner, 42% of CEOs have embarked on digital business transformation journeys—and many are facing challenges with changing the company culture, the resulting resistance to change, attracting new talent, catching up with the competition, and dealing with an outdated technology stack. The list continues, but I will stop there for now because I think you get the idea.

I don’t think anyone questions the fact that most of enterprise communications is going SIP. We hear it everywhere. But I still get people asking about why it is such a big deal. Isn’t it just another signaling protocol? Is there really a strategic advantage to go SIP? The answer is an overwhelming YES! SIP’s flexibility and interoperability makes it an obvious choice. But I do think it’s important to dive into the details to know exactly why SIP is such a big deal. I think of SIP having three major strategic use cases. Generally in order of adoption, they are:

Automation has been changing the customer experience (CX) for years with self-service and predictive routing. Artificial intelligence (AI), however, takes it to a whole new level. To understand this, we must first weed through some of the hype. For example, AI is not going to entirely replace your workforce.

As Leslie Willcocks, a professor at the McKinsey London School of Economics, stated, “AI will take the robot out of the human.” This means that AI will free workers from mundane, mind-numbing, repetitive tasks and allow them to concentrate on the more challenging and complex customer issues where they can take pride in adding value to the customer experience.

Acquisitions can present a variety of challenges. When two companies have very different cultures, it can be difficult to bring them together in a way that satisfies employees from both original companies. Productivity can suffer when employees are stripped of the tools that help them do their jobs effectively.

So much of what we hear about the cloud makes it sound like a mythical place where everything connects and works together with ease. Those of us in charge of facilitating these outcomes know that the reality is very different. The cloud can bring many benefits to your business, but success is not guaranteed if you neglect to create and execute upon a strategic plan. These five steps are a great starting point for setting your business up for success in the cloud.

Monitoring is a consistently difficult component within the IT realm. The issue is rooted in the assumptions we make on how well the tools work without truly understanding what is going on. By seeing a demo at a trade show, we are in awe that someone “cracked the code,” only to go home and find out after purchase and set-up that the great answer out of the box just leads down the long road to disappointment we know all too well.