ConvergeOne Receives Cisco Global Award for Customer Experience Partner of the Year

This week at Cisco’s annual partner conference, Cisco recognized ConvergeOne with a Global Award for Customer Experience Partner of the Year for rising to market shifts and demonstrating transformative thought leadership that ensures the highest level of customer success, expertise, and dedication as customers transition to subscription and XaaS buying models.

My past several blog posts have been talking about the characteristics of a modern communications platform. We’ve talked about the technical things we need to pay attention to in order to deliver a better end-user experience. We’ve talked about the embracing of a mobile-first philosophy, the need for an 11-digit E.164 dial plan to enable better directory integration and click-to-call, the advantages of SIP signaling for endpoints, and so on. We’ve still got a few topics to talk about, but I wanted to share a personal experience I had recently that reminded me why it is so critically important to have these modernization conversations proactively as opposed to waiting until it’s too late.

Salelytics is a leading provider of inside sales and multi-channel communication, with 30+ years of experience, 1,500 employees across 5 offices, and 70 Fortune 100 clients. Salelytics turned to ConvergeOne for support when it was first spun off from its parent company and had to completely start over in terms of its infrastructure, support, and expertise.

I’ve been known to use quotes to inspire or strengthen my message, so here goes: “The sky is falling, the sky is falling” (The Remarkable Story of Chicken Little, 1840). Believe it or not, this Chicken Little quote has significance to businesses: If you are not ready for incidents, individuals will go into a panic and act like the sky is falling. Preventing this is the main focus of an incident response plan (IRP), which takes control of events that could cause catastrophic harm to your organization in advance so that you do not panic when they actually occur.

Customers want to be more than a number. They want companies to quickly recognize who they are, anticipate what they want, and solve their problems quickly. And they want this recognition to extend across any interaction they have with a business—whether it’s phone, email, chat, SMS, or social media.

Disasters. They can mean different things to different companies. One company might be scrambling without any sense of direction during a malware attack; another company might be as cool as a cucumber. The difference is having a plan in place and the right personnel to help fulfill it. Franz Kafka, a major figure in 20th-century literature, stated, “Better to have and not need than to need and not have.”

Oscar Wilde once stated, “To expect the unexpected shows a thoroughly modern intellect.” In continuing our look into being prepared during Cybersecurity Awareness Month, our second installment will focus on business continuity, what it entails, and the ongoing process to ensure it doesn’t become a "set it and forget it.”

Maintaining an optimized, healthy, and modern IT infrastructure is crucial for the survival of any business. ConvergeOne Managed Services, powered by OnGuard, allows IT staff to rest easy knowing that a highly-skilled team of engineers leveraging an industry-leading management platform are watching over their customer’s environment. OnGuard has been developed by ConvergeOne from real-world engineering insights and decades of experience managing client infrastructures.

October is Cybersecurity Awareness Month, but it’s about more than just awareness. It’s important that your organization is prepared for the inevitability of facing cyberthreats.

Continuing our discussion of Communication Modernization from my last post, I want to talk about migrating to SIP endpoints. What about SIP trunks, you ask? I’m not sure I’d consider SIP trunks a “modernization” thing anymore. Many made that switch a LONG time ago—it’s a complete no-brainer for most customers that I deal with. Reduce hardware, decrease cost, increase flexibility, easier redundancy… what’s not to love? No, instead I’m talking about hardphones and softphones. Using SIP as the signaling protocol is almost always the right answer. Let’s talk about why.