2020 VISION
Ringing the changes? With the new decade
upon us, what better time to ask industry
leader and TelcoSwitch CEO Russell Lux what
he thinks about where the industry is today
and where we are going in 2020.
CONVERGENCE
For us at TelcoSwitch group, this is the big trend
that is driving everything else. Imagine if you were
setting up a new business today compared to even
five years ago. From a technical standpoint, from
traditional IT endpoints to hosted PBX, provisioning
is so much easier right across the board. The Cloud
has made all different kinds of services available
and accessible, and businesses can be much more
flexible and productive because of it.
At TelcoSwitch we see convergence as a massive
benefit, and in fact it brings us closer to the
omnichannel vision we have for all of our partners
and customers. We are finally at the point where
they can really have it their own way in terms of
their technology footprint, and we are just here to
guide them and make their vision a reality. We still
do that by providing the technical building blocks of
course, but what is different for 2020 is that more
than ever we are driven by empowering our partners
and helping them to achieve success.
Our new Portal will enable new levels of self-service
and instant control for our partners. Because of
convergence it means that more and more elements
of a businesses’ technology footprint are becoming
part of what would traditionally be separate.
Omnichannel means exactly that – Voice, Chat,
Collaboration, even Video, are all part of the same
picture.
USER EXPERIENCE
It is our view at TelcoSwitch that for 2020, the bar
has been raised where it comes to User Experience,
making the latest technologies and working
methods accessible to more people than ever
before. From handset design to the way that the
device is integrated with other systems, everything
is set up now to be more straightforward, to the
point where the end user doesn’t really care what is
happening technically, it all just works!
We have made every effort to design all elements of
our solutions in a straightforward manner, with the
highest levels of partner enablement and customer
service to back this up. Obviously our new portal is
the biggest and most significant building block in
that, but it is also about some of the new features
in CallSwitch, where we have recently released
Version 6.
We feel that Version 6 is a significant step forward
where User Experience is concerned, for example
the new outbound campaign dialler functionality
for Contact Centres, internal and external Video
conferencing, and we have invested a lot into
making it everything our partners have been
asking for. When it comes to cutting over to a
new TelcoSwitch-powered solution, we are really
confident that it is a plug and play, turnkey solution.
Better User Experience is a win-win all round
and at the beginning of this new decade, it really
should be something for which there is no need for
compromise.
MICROSOFT
COLLABORATION
This is where convergence really takes off. The clear
trend for 2020 is towards empowering productivity
through collaboration, and for the most part that
means the Cloud, and O365. We have seen over
the past couple of years that the O365 / Azure
ecosystem is where more and more organisations
are going, and TelcoSwitch is very much geared
towards that as well. One of our most important new
services is our Microsoft Teams integration, which
launched recently as CallSwitch 2Teams.
It’s easy to underestimate how much of a
difference this new collaborative ability makes for
organisations - of any size. From the predictable
cost base and built-in security to the massive
flexibility this gives to users wherever they happen
to be, organisations are now taking the opportunity
to make collaborative technology a key part of how
they work. For example, it’s now a simple matter to
work on a document as a team based in different
locations completely seamlessly, empowered
by flexible voice and text chat services, without
document version clash or patchy communications
ever becoming a problem.
Just a few years ago this would only have been
available at great cost to the largest organisations –
now, everyone can do it.
‘CallSwitch Meeting’, available Q1 2020