Out-of-the-box support with WhatsApp integration
WhatsApp is a great leap forward for your customer service. You should adopt it as an additional tool to redefine your approach to service and expand your contact channels. Managers should consider that multichannel service is not just a trend that companies need to address, but a new scenario to harness. In which sense?
Ensuring that customers can choose the most appropriate and convenient channel to contact you is crucial to reach a broader customer base. People now expect to be answered quickly, almost immediately and prefer to use different channels to get a response as quickly as possible.
Let’s analyze together the main pros of adding WhatsApp to your contact center.
WhatsApp in a nutshell
WhatsApp is one of the most popular instant messaging applications. With over 2,24 billion monthly active users, it records 1 billion messages in a single day worldwide and this number is set to grow exponentially every year. This is a huge milestone for this application (source WhatsApp blog) chosen by people all over the world for its friendly user interface that makes it easy to communicate with friends, families, and even businesses.
WhatsApp is available in 180 countries, and 60 languages and it is the 8th most downloaded Android App in the Google Play Store worldwide. It is adopted as a business application by more than 50 million companies worldwide. And surprisingly, 175 million people choose it every day to contact companies and get a quick answer to their questions.
Why integrate WhatsApp
Using WhatsApp as an additional communication tool for your company is a wise choice. It adds value to your company, as your agents can assist with customer inquiries through the most popular instant messaging application. It enables high levels of satisfaction for three main reasons:
- Handle requests in real-time - People are very familiar with WhatsApp. They use it daily for personal purposes and are therefore inclined to choose it to contact companies and get quick answers. Adopting this application for business interactions can really make a difference in your support: it guarantees people what they expect. In other words, it meets their expectations: with personal one-to-one messages, you can quickly provide the information they require.
- Business-centric approach - WhatsApp allows you to provide engaging support by also sharing media, such as images, videos, and documents. All these aspects are essential to serve people in the best possible way. For example, you can immediately send a product catalog or product photos while chatting with a potential customer and have the opportunity to increase sales. It is also useful to share company information, such as order notifications, payment dates, and shipping details.
- Easy integrable tool - WhatsApp can be an integral part of your customer service platform, being successfully integrated with your CRM, your attendant console, and your compliance recorder. All these UC applications can be seamlessly integrated into one cloud-based ecosystem to have everything your agents need to provide satisfactory assistance. To be clearer, the customer's background is immediately available at your fingertips to ensure high-quality service.
What are you waiting for?
Adopt WhatsApp to empower your company to boost customer service, the potential of this application is huge.
Contact our experts now to learn more about integrating our contact center with WhatsApp.
Mida and Bludis: together to boost Italian companies UC
Mida is proud to share with you a new partnership to propose UC solutions to the Italian market. We have just signed a business agreement with Bludis, Esprinet Group’s next-generation vendor of information technology with 28 years of experience in the market. Bludis is specializing in the emerging areas of IT Management, Security, and Communication in Italy.
For Mida and Bludis this is a win-win relationship that will stretch the solution portfolio of Bludis-Esprinet and allow us to intercept a wider range of companies willing to move their communications to the Cloud with professional cutting-edge applications - including compliance recorder, attendant console, and contact center. Together we will propose a future-forward migration with advanced UC features to fulfill any communication requirements.
Through this partnership, we answer the increasingly widespread need for Unified Communication in Italy. We are joining our strengths and our expertise to make the most of Unified Communication solutions for the Italian landscape today. Many Italian companies are showing interest in this adoption and together we are ready to respond to these requests by meeting at our best their needs with flexible solutions.
"The agreement with Mida allows us to enhance our Communication offer, which is a key area in every sector because effective collaborations translate into efficiency for companies. In this sense, the partnership gives us an active role in directing retailers and end users towards Mida’s UC suite of products and services and all the benefits it can guarantee", says Maurizio Erbani, General Manager of Bludis.
"In the post-pandemic world, companies need to adopt professional UC solutions, available in the cloud, that embrace different contexts and technologies. The partnership with Bludis is crucial to support companies with vision and experience towards the new processes needed to grow in efficiency and productivity", says Marco Cortese, President of Mida Solutions.
The partnership is off to a great start: a press release has just been published and a webinar together is already planned for April 27th at 11 AM.
Would you like to know more about this news? Stay tuned by signing up for our monthly newsletter. We will give you all the information.
Microsoft Teams: the latest updates - March 2023
Microsoft takes care to always enhance the user experience of its communication and collaboration experience in Microsoft Teams. Keeping up with these periodic updates to be even more efficient by using this powerful ecosystem is not an easy task. So, let’s go through the most important ones to let you understand how to increase your efficiency within this platform.
Here is a brief summary:
MEETINGS
- Targeted notifications - During meetings, special alerts can be sent to specific participants through a bot. These notifications are private and they are visible as a pop-up on the screen.
- Explicit recording consent - Microsoft Teams now supports the option to expressly ask for the consent of all the meeting attendees to record the online event. Only with their consent the voice and video can be captured. This new feature is important to meet specific privacy regulations.
- Magnify PowerPoint Live Presentations - When PowerPoint Live slides are presented, each attendee can now privately zoom in on the shared content. It allows the person to better read the shared information. There is also a “Sync to presenter” button to resume following the presenter.
CHATS
- @mention new options - As to mention a person in the chat, now it is possible to type “everyone” after @ to send a notification to all the group members to convey a specific message. According to recipient notification settings, he will receive it to be alerted of messages in which they are involved.
Furthermore, in a group chat, by using @ and typing the name of the contact it is possible to quickly add him as a new participant.
- Improved profile cards - In the previous updates, Microsoft released an integration with LinkedIn that allows a fast connection between the contact information in the chat and his social network profile. Being aware of the importance of having a contact background, Microsoft has made available additional details about a teammate in Teams. For instance, it is visible pending meeting invites or birthdays.
- Download file location - Users can choose their preferred location where the file downloaded from Microsoft Teams chats can be stored. This option makes it easier to find download files.
CALLS
- Busy-on-busy call feature - When a person is busy in a call or meeting, he can set up better incoming call management. In his Microsoft Teams settings, new multiple choices will be available for handling these calls, such as “play a busy signal” or “redirect call”. This feature can be customized by administrators and end users.
Stay tuned to read through our article the future Microsoft Teams updates. Meanwhile, discover how our UC solutions can help you improve your communications within Microsoft Teams.
Why is flexibility essential for your contact center?
Choosing the right UC system for your customer service is a priority. Streamlining agents’ workflow allows them to better perform and consequently deliver high-quality support.
In a fast-transforming digital landscape, it is essential to empower employees with an advanced toolkit to deal with the most complex issues and the most sensitive conversations. They should be able to seamlessly assist customers’ requests. Resolving them in a quick and efficient manner increases people's satisfaction. They will enjoy the company's service. Consequently, the adopted solution should be flexible enough to meet customers' and agents’ needs.
Flexibility is a really appealing feature of this UC solution. It comes behind the mere meaning of this word. It gathers different crucial aspects to be considered when you are evaluating a contact center. Let’s go deeper into them.
Why is flexibility a key aspect of modern customer service?
- Accessibility - The hybrid working approach is a scenario that is here to stay and the company should face it with the right UC solution. The contact center tool you are evaluating should ensure this seatless aspect. It needs to be accessible from any location in the Cloud by multiple users just by using their credentials. Furthermore, a unique interface with centralized management and conversation history should be provided.
- Turnkey all-in-one system - Your new contact center solution should include easy-to-use full-featured cloud-based UC applications, such as attendant console, compliance recorder, queue management system, and IVR. It should be also integrated with your CRM system and other business processes to decrease the time wasted by your agents to jump from one tool to another. In this way, all your agents need to smoothly carry out their daily operations is well incorporated in a unique environment, such as Microsoft Teams. Consequently, it lets them be more productive.
- Multi-channel approach - A modern advanced contact center should allow companies to provide multi-channel support letting customers interact with your team across different methods (e.g. calls, chats, emails). The platform your agents should rely on needs to be flexible to collect information from different sources and make it available in the same unified ecosystem, such as Microsoft Teams. As a result, a consistent customer experience is ensured because your agents have all customer information at hand.
- Gradual migration to the Cloud - The solution you are selecting should be flexible enough to guarantee a progressive swift of your Unified Communications from legacy systems to the Cloud. For many reasons, such as financial and organizational requirements, you can prefer to adopt a contact center that grants the coexistence of legacy and cloud technologies. This flexible aspect can be crucial in your evaluation process because it lets gradually scale up licenses and defer migration costs.
- Easy scalability - Your new contact center should be adequately flexible to evolve with your business scenario. It should follow both the growth of your company, the evolution of the market and also meet your customers’ demands. In other words, you should select a UC solution that can be activated with an “as a service” licensing model to allow you to decrease service inefficiencies. In other words, with this approach, you can easily add and remove licenses as required as well as pay only for what your agents really need and use.
Give agents the flexibility they need to provide a top-quality service by adopting the right toolkit. Discover more about our flexible solution, Mida C3 - Cloud Contact Center here. It combines all the highlighted aspects.
Main pros of a multi-channel support
Providing satisfactory customer service makes a difference in your business growth. How people's conversations are managed plays a crucial role in customer experience. In other words, fulfilled support positively impacts decision processes. People are likely to purchase again from companies that offer a five-star service.
Consequently, it is important to keep in mind how your customer service is organized to handle requests as well as choosing advanced Unified Communications solutions that support it. Your workplace should be efficiently organized to let employees provide the best service ever.
What are people looking for now?
Nowadays, people are accustomed to communicating with companies through different online channels, from traditional calls, live chats, emails, social media, and more.
This means digital interactions are currently dominant. Customers are accustomed to using three or four different channels to contact a company. Their expectations have increased over time. They don’t like to explain their request twice or wait too long to get an ultimate answer. Therefore, ensuring the option to choose different methods to interact is an added value for your customers.
What are the main pros of a multi-channel contact center?
Stop offering siloed channels that sound inefficient for your customers. You should keep up with current customers’ behavior and preferences and rely on an advanced cloud-based contact center solution to guarantee a multi-channel contact approach. It is a key differentiator that should not be underestimated. It will bring several advantages both for you and your customers.
PROS FOR YOUR COMPANY:
- Seatless scenario - With this advanced contact center, such as the Mida one, your agents can provide a wide range of support methods from anywhere. They just need a connection: with their credentials, your employees can access the solution and easily handle all corporate conversations. What they need to manage them is at their fingertips. They don’t have to jump from one platform to another. This means they are empowered to be efficient.
- Single view of the customer information - The big challenge of this approach is to offer unified support. In this scenario, customer details and business data should not be lost across the involved business channels and they should be efficiently coordinated in a unique ecosystem. Relying on an advanced contact center, like Mida’s one, these aspects are ensured. The solution is integrated with your CRM tool and other business systems that deal with these aspects. They are well-organized and incorporated in the same environment, such as Microsoft Teams.
- Increased productivity - By relying on different channels, people can contact you as they prefer and simple requests can be quickly handled through immediate sources, such as chats with automated messages. Consequently, just complex requests are handled by an agent through a voice conversation. In other words, the number of calls is reduced and the burden on your employees is decreased too. Thus, both your agents and service efficiencies are boosted.
PROS FOR YOUR CUSTOMERS:
- Wide options to contact you - By providing multi-channel support, you allow customers to avoid boring calls and choose the most comfortable channel at each moment to get the quickest answer. This approach will raise the company’s perception because it lets you meet people's support needs.
- Fast support - Thanks to this approach, automated messages can quickly nip simple queries and your customers can enjoy this timeliness service. It is now clear that live chats have the highest satisfaction level due to their prompt response. People can contact you every day, all day by relying on these automated answers.
- Enhanced brand image - By offering support through different channels, you convey the message that your organization is customer-centric. The needs of your customers are considered and efficiently met. This makes them feel satisfied and understood. They can enjoy the experience with your company.
Does it seem appealing to you?
Mida’s contact center could be your choice to engage with your customers in this way. Go deeper into this topic by visiting this page.
Enterprise Connect: why meet us at booth 335?
The enterprise IT community is going to gather to share opinions about the latest technologies and solutions in the UC market in Orlando, FL.
Are you among the attendees of Enterprise Connect 2023 to get a glimpse of what’s new?
Don’t make commitments, this international conference will take place at Gaylord Palms on March, 27th-30th.
As in the previous edition, we are an exhibitor to present our advanced UC solutions - including contact center, attendant console, and compliance recorder - for Microsoft Teams and Zoom.
Register now with our promo code MIDA
to SAVE $500 on your conference pass (here).
Why attend this event?
It is a powerful opportunity to network with new acquaintances, meet partners and explore the valuable suggestions from market experts on how to take the most from communication and collaboration solutions in the Cloud.
Why meet us?
Are you an end-user, a service provider, or a system integrator? Seize the chance to discuss with our Managers your corporate requirements. Our professional attendant console and compliance recorder are suitable for any company’s needs.
They will be glad to highlight the best practices to empower customer service agents by adopting advanced communications solutions. Nowadays, it is essential to point out the key role of providing multi-channel support.
We are waiting for you at booth #335.
How to gradually migrate UC to the Cloud?
The new era of corporate communications has already begun: digital interactions are widely part of the business environment. Organizations are aware of the pros of moving their legacy system to the Cloud but how to efficiently handle this transition? Is it possible to do it step by step?
Often this migration is not an easy process and there is fuzzy knowledge about this topic. Let’s shed some light on this shift because only a few people know that it is possible to carry it out gradually. In other words, companies can partially maintain their current analog telephony system and progressively cross this path to cloud-based ecosystems, such as Microsoft Teams and Zoom.
Many entities, that are willing to begin this upgrading process, are not ready enough to completely migrate their UC to the Cloud, for many reasons, among which are financial and operational aspects. Having deeply understood this scenario, Mida proposes a transition approach with a step ahead. Now available is a new architecture flexible enough to guarantee the coexistence of legacy technologies and Microsoft Teams or Zoom, in the same environment.
It is the ideal solution for companies, including the biggest ones, that want to defer the transitioning costs. The initial investment is contained as a result of maintaining some legacy phones and only switching bit by bit some extensions to the Cloud. The transition is progressive. This means these technologies can synergistically cohabit by combining the simplicity of the cloud-based solutions with the analog system. Corporate communications between PSTN, legacy, and digital extensions can be handled with Mida’s UC suite.
Furthermore, this smooth transition is very attractive also considering that it involves turnkey solutions. Mida’s UC offering, which includes contact center, attendant console, and compliance recorder, is easy to activate and simple to configure. These elements are essential to accompany companies to optimally face this change.
To sum up, companies can decide how to move to the Cloud in accordance with companies' business requirements. Does it sound appealing to you? Speak with our experts now to gradually move to the Cloud.
How to satisfy customers by relying on Microsoft Teams-certified UC solutions?
Exceed customers’ expectations by choosing a contact center and a compliance recorder certified by Microsoft Teams to provide excellent service. Adopting these two applications is a successful choice to make your customers more satisfied with your support. A top quality level and a high secure grade are ensured by the certification. Each of these solutions has been tested to verify that Microsoft’s standards are respected. Thus the accreditation lets companies be thoughtless about the adopted communication tool. They can rely on an advanced professional solution to ensure astonishing support.
What does the user expect from Mida’s certified solutions?
Mida decided to certify its contact center and compliance recorder to add extra value to these solutions. The main aim is to provide a complete advanced suite of certified UC solutions to companies seeking for moving their corporate communications to the Microsoft Teams environment. These solutions guarantee several different pros:
CONTACT CENTER
With this UC solution, Microsoft Teams users can rely on advanced call management features that augment and enhance the basic Teams calling functions. A Teams-like user experience allows agents to become faster familiar with the solution: there are no disruptive elements in the UX. All is well-organized and intuitive like in Teams.
Mida C3 - Cloud Contact Center has been designed to streamline agents' activities and increase service productivity with an all-in-one suite of solutions:
- It is cloud-based, it just needs a browser to use it
- Its setup is simple and fast to let users quickly use the solution
- It is integrated with the main CRMs to increase the smooth management of requests.
- It is a complete UC suite that includes attendant console, queue management, IVR & automated attendant, and compliance recorder. Managers can choose what to adopt according to their specific needs.
COMPLIANCE RECORDER
Mida’s professional recording solution allows companies to collect and archive and listen to Teams-to-Teams conversations and interactions between PSTN and Teams and vice versa. This solution lets companies securely record communications according to international and national privacy and security laws (e.g. GDPR and MiFID II) and corporate policies and practices. This recorder is flexible enough to be compliant with both external and internal requirements.
It means, with Mida’s compliance recorder, conversations, and their metadata, are safely stored in the preferred storage in the same country where conversations are made for a specific amount of time. The retention period is easily settable to keep communications archived just for the time companies are entitled to store the file.
A high level of security is also ensured by file compression, encryption, and marking proof against tampering threats.
Why did Mida decide to invest in this certification?
As a company with +18 years of experience in the UC market and with an innovative approach, Mida felt the emerging need of the market of adopting new cutting-edge technology, such as Microsoft Teams, for communications handling long before the Pandemic. Mida decided to quickly work on a complete suite of UC solutions for Microsoft Teams to empower companies to provide satisfactory customer service within this cloud-based platform. Grasping the increasing demand for these solutions the next step could not only have been to enter into the Microsoft Teams certification program. This accreditation confirms the successful decision to invest in this popular technology. Mida has been the first Italian company to achieve this goal by certifying its contact center and compliance recorder.
Would you like to know more about our certified offering? Ask for a demo here, one of our experts will be back to you shortly.
3 key benefits of UCaaS for any company, including yours
Companies worldwide are seeking to move their corporate communications to the Cloud by adopting UC applications that completely fit their business needs. Choosing these solutions is not an easy and immediate decision but one aspect is clear: any entity can benefit from selecting UC solutions as a Service (UCaaS). Let’s go deeper into the main advantages of this increasingly required pay-per-use licensing approach.
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Subscription-based services in the Cloud
Firstly, by paying a monthly fee, enterprises easily activate the licenses of the UC solutions they need to efficiently manage business communication. This means employees have direct simple access to the solutions from any location in the Cloud with their credentials and the company pays just for what they use.
Furthermore, companies are allowed to personalize their cloud-based UC system with their preferred applications. All they need, such as voice and video applications and messaging solutions, are included in a system provided and handled by Service Providers and System Integrators. In other words, no additional aspects are required to get advanced UC features.
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Hand-off maintenance
The “as a Service approach” offloads maintenance, upgradings, security, and implementation to the provider of these solutions who oversees all these system aspects. Companies no longer have to worry about having a dedicated team that only deals with them. Thanks to UCaaS, the solutions are ready to use as well as companies only activate a license to immediately use them.
Consequently, this model makes UC solutions more accessible for enterprises because it is the easier, quicker, and simpler approach they can choose to shift their communications to the Cloud. In brief, it is a time-saving approach: solutions are provided as turnkey up-to-date UC applications on a single platform. Employees are empowered to easily use them in their day-to-day activities.
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Cost-saving, scalability, and efficiency
Since companies pay just for what they use, UCaaS is an ideal adoption model for unpredictable markets and growing businesses. By relying on it, entities are allowed to rapidly increase or decrease the number of licenses they need as well as add or remove applications in the subscription. Thus service inefficiencies are avoided and entities can take the most from the UC solutions they have activated.
Furthermore, it is important to consider that with this method no hardware costs are required as in the on-prem infrastructure. With a perpetual license and a high initial investment, on-premises systems do not allow such a scalable and efficient scenario, typical of the UCaaS model.
Do you still have doubts about UCaaS and its benefits?
Discuss this approach with our experts. They will highlight the main pros according to your needs and show you our as a Service offering.
Why choose a Microsoft Teams-Certified UC solution?
What does choosing Microsoft Teams-certified UC solutions for customer service really mean? Marco Cortese, Mida's President and Sales Manager, has been recently interviewed by UC Today, the leading online publication for Unified Communications and Collaboration news, to shed light on this topic by explaining the main advantages of this choice. Let’s summarize the key points of the video.
Firstly, Marco Cortese notes that these years Microsoft has completely changed how people communicate and collaborate by proposing a UC platform that supports a remote and hybrid work scenario. Already during the Covid-19 Pandemic, managers have understood that these new habits are here to stay and they have chosen Microsoft Teams to handle interactions. Microsoft Teams has been adopted as a new corporate communication system, bringing the need to integrate third-party solutions in the same environment.
Nowadays, it is increasingly apparent how this integrated approach helps to increase customer satisfaction: it helps increase agents’ productivity by decreasing the wasted time spent on moving from one application to another. That’s why many companies choose this complete ecosystem with its integrations like UC-certified solutions.
Secondly, Mida’s President states that enterprises prefer certified solutions, because the high standards of security and quality of Microsoft are guaranteed by this accreditation. This certification adds value to these applications which companies could count on for their services. It is evidence of how these applications work within the Microsoft ecosystem.
Then the interview goes through Mida’s certified contact center and compliance recorder to highlight the main reasons why decision-makers should adopt these certified solutions, instead of non-certified ones, and why Mida chose to invest in this certification.
Go deeper into this topic by watching the interview.