Microsoft-Ribbon Workshop: a precious day to learn and networking
In the Microsoft Italia offices in Milan, last week Mida took part as a speaker at Ribbon Communications’s training day on the news of Microsoft Teams Direct Routing. This in-person technical event was a great opportunity to learn and discuss all the essential information related to corporate communication processes and to network with Ribbon’s partners.
During the morning, the Sales Manager and President of Mida Solutions, Marco Cortese, showcased Mida’s UCaaS applications for Teams. If you could not attend the event, download the slide he presented at this link.
This particular moment of synergies allows Mida to shed light on the new advanced UC solutions and the new licensing methods. Companies should keep in mind what changes occurred during the Covid-19 Pandemic corporate communications. In the last two years, Microsoft faced this topic by proposing in a new way a cutting-edge ecosystem, Microsoft Teams. With 270 million active users per month, this platform has been the most adopted hub to handle interactions.
In this one-day workshop, it was essential to keep in mind how Microsoft redesigned an entire ecosystem, thought about how to connect devices and met all the security parameters required by call handling and UC data management.
Companies worldwide have started to move, more or less gradually, their communications from legacy technologies to Microsoft Teams. This scenario has highlighted a step-by-step migration request which results in the demand for flexible UC solutions. Managers have begun to look for architectures that allow these two technologies to coexist in the same environment. This is one of the main topics highlighted by Marco Cortese during his presentation: Mida has understood this relevant aspect and has designed an advanced UC suite for Microsoft Teams that let companies implement a hybrid model.
In this scenario, being consistent with the high quality and security standards people expect from Microsoft solutions is an essential aspect. Taking care of always ensuring this added value, Mida has chosen to enter the Microsoft Teams certification program. Mida has recently achieved this relevant milestone: Mida Contact Center and Mida Compliance Recorded have recently been certified for Microsoft Teams. Mida is the first Italian company to obtain this valuable acknowledgment.
The workshop attendees highlighted their appreciation for these Cloud UC solutions, which can be activated with a new licensing approach: SaaS. This innovative turnkey model proposed by Mida allows SMB companies to adopt Mida’s solutions to professionally manage their whole business conversations within Microsoft Teams. This approach offloads to Mida all the deployment and management thoughts.
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Contact Center vs Call Center: what you should know
Does your company need a contact center or a call center to handle conversations? This is a critical question to project an efficient customer service strategy.
Customer support features have changed over the years. This is the result of technological evolution and change in people’s behavior. There's been an evolution indeed: customers' interaction with companies and collaboration between employees are increasingly within an omnichannel scenario. Despite this element, not every company has the same requirements and the same customer behaviors. Your decision-makers should choose the right specific UC system to support your customer service activities. They should know the main differences between a contact center and a call center.
The line between these two UC solutions is often fuzzy and we want to shed light on this topic because choosing the wrong center negatively impacts your business growth and your customer satisfaction. It is the first key aspect to be considered when you think about offering a 5-star customer experience!
Let’s analyze them to understand which best suits your business needs.
What is a call center?
The call center is the traditional customer service system that handles inbound and outbound conversations between customers and company representatives through telephones, despite of whether it is a legacy or VoIP call.
An automated call answering system (IVR), with sophisticated distributed algorithms, and a queue manager help this department efficiently answer a huge volume of requests. It decreases the waiting time so callers receive personalized support in the shortest possible time and the most skilled agent can quickly resolve customers’ issues. In this case, a well-trained team makes a difference in this customer support service.
What is a contact center?
The contact center is a more complex customer service system that, unlike the call center, handles inbound and outbound interactions through different channels, such as calls, instant messaging applications, social media, emails, live chats, forums, and SMS. Customers can get in touch with the company in more convenient ways for them. CRM integration is essential: all customers’ information must be well combined in a unique hub.
to promptly handle conversations coming from many channels at the best, agents should have all the information at their fingertips.
So is a contact center just a call center with a step ahead?
It would seem so, but there are other aspects to be considered. The difference between these two systems is not only related to the supported channels but also concerns more complex elements:
- skills: contact center agents are required to have verbal and written skills, social media management skills, and multitasking in addition to empathy and patience, typical in the call center department. They should be familiar with other communication channels and be well-trained for each one.
- customer self-service: with a contact center approach customers have more possibilities to solve their problems by themselves quicker than within a call center. In this last scenario, they can only rely on customizable audio messages (IVR), while in more complex customer service they can count on FAQ webpages, forums, and chatbots. This complete self-service approach reduces costs and employees’ workload because only complex inquiries can be posed to agents.
- technologies: the contact center puts together different channels of communication and this means it needs additional technical elements to efficiently handle a huge number of requests, such as an email response management system to automatically answer emails, and advanced analytics to track KPIs to always improve performances and ensure top-quality service.
The decision of which solutions should be adopted could be tricky if you don’t consider your priority business needs, your products and services, and your customers’ behaviors. Contact one of our experts to discuss your priorities and get the most adapted UC solution.
Microsoft Teams updates - fall 2022
Every month Microsoft shares a long list of new Microsoft Teams updates to improve its user experience. This fall the changes involved meetings, chat, and calling features and now we would like to roll out here a summary with the most relevant ones:
MEETINGS
- Payment system - This new feature will let people pay directly through a payment app in Microsoft Teams for classes, appointments, or events hosted on this platform. This app will be available firstly for businesses in the USA and Canada to be paid in just a few clicks during the meetings, after having connected to this app a third–party payment service such as PayPal or Stripe.
- Speaker Coach - To improve how meetings are presented, the coach speaker service will share in real time on Microsoft Teams private suggestions and feedback on speaking skills, such as “talk slower” or “pay more attention to overlaps”. Valuable insights from the last meeting are also available in Microsoft Teams to let the speaker better perform in the next one.
- Assign virtual seats - An even more cutting-edge user experience will be available during meetings: organizers and presenters can assign virtual seats on Together Mode to make this virtual event more like an in-person one. From the settings options, it will be possible to drag and drop users’ icons to the desired seat.
- Captions transcription - Microsoft Teams premium subscribers can soon let all meeting attendees rely on a real-time captions translation during virtual events in 40 spoken languages. This will help people better to follow presentations by having a more accessible experience.
- Magnify Slide - From December 2022, attendees will privately zoom presentations during Microsoft Teams meetings to greater elements in the slides.
CHAT
- Video Clip - In Microsoft Teams chat, users can soon capture short video clips (up to a minute) to easily reply to a message. The video message can be edited, sent, and playback on desktop, mobile, and browser chat due by late November 2022.
- Unmanaged users invitation - The users external from the company can invite other people to join a group on Microsoft Teams and soon there will be available the possibility to accept this invitation or decide to decline it by leaving the group. A notification of this invitation will appear on Microsoft Teams and it advises the employee to be careful of unknown user messages because they could be spam or phishing attempts.
CALLING
- New call history - More information about calls will be shown on the Microsoft Teams call tab to get a more complete picture of the calling scenario. Users soon will be aware of how all the incoming calls were controlled once received and be informed if they have been transferred or forwarded to them.
- Contact Groups - On the Call Apps, it will be possible to create groups of contacts and, of course, manage the already existing ones and their memberships. This contact organization will help users quickly search for people on the contacts repository.
Stay always tuned on what’s new in Microsoft Teams by reading our monthly newsletter and do not hesitate to contact our experts to know how to leverage your Unified Communications within Microsoft Teams.
Mida Compliance Recorder is now on Zoom Marketplace
Mida Solutions is proud to announce its latest milestone: Mida Compliance Recorder has just been published on Zoom Marketplace. Recently Mida has expanded its portfolio with advanced UC solutions for Zoom to lets companies who daily use this communication and collaboration platform provide five-star customer service by relying on additional professional features. This recording system imports from Zoom the lists of users and the Zoom recordings and show these files to the Zoom users.
Tracking the calls within Zoom has never been so easy: Zoom users can now take advantage of this all-in-one recording system that securely collects and archive any conversation (Zoom-Zoom calls, PSTN-Zoom calls, and calls from PSTN) in the company’s preferred local repository. This kind of centralized storage makes sure that no copy of communications is kept inside Zoom unless the managers want it to.
This cloud-based solution ensures compliance recording by professionally meeting with the latest privacy regulations (GDPR, MiFID II) or internal security protocols. The conversation files are encrypted, compressed, and marked with an anti-tamper signature to guarantee a reliable solution for each industry. These requirements and precautions are typically required in critical environments and financial institutions to avoid unwanted privacy and security issues.
Companies can also get full control of user permissions: administrators can set up the user access level to authorize who can listen and manage the recordings and who can have access, typically the supervisor, to teams’ conversations to understand how the customer service is performing.
The user can access the list of the conversations through this new Zoom App and can manage them through the Playback Station, the intuitive web UI for Mida recording systems. This web page allows users to easily search the archived calls with the call tags and metadata (e.g. telephone extensions and date) fields associated with these conversations. This user-friendly interface also allows the user to add notes and tags to specific calls and download them with a click.
Would you like to get this Compliance Recorder? Your agents will love this reliable and easy-to-use recording solution, also available with an aaS approach.
Sign in now to add it directly from Zoom Marketplace.
Mida Contact Center and Compliance Recorder are officially certified for Microsoft Teams
Mida has a big milestone that would like to share with you: its Contact center and Compliance Recorder have recently been certified for Microsoft Teams. All the big steps required by Microsoft for this relevant certification have been completed to have valuable proof of the compatibility of our solutions with the Microsoft Teams ecosystem. It has been a challenging process that makes the whole Mida team really satisfied for the effort everyone put in these months for certification.
What does it mean?
This achievement is important evidence of the high quality and reliability of Mida's offering because all the interoperability and security tests have been successfully passed. This highlights that Mida’s solutions meet the Microsoft standards and functionalities companies expect from Microsoft solutions.
Mida is the first Italian enterprise who achieve this valuable certification both for the contact center and recording systems. This makes the team more proud to provide companies worldwide with professionally calling features certified to be integrated with the Microsoft ecosystem to efficiently handle and store a high volume of conversations.
Mida UC services involved in the certification
Considering the exponential growth of Microsoft Teams adoption in companies around the world and the consequent higher request of professional third-parties service tools in support of this platform to promptly handle customer issues, Mida decided to be part of Microsoft Certification Programs to add to its UC solutions an important value.
Mida C3 - Cloud Contact Center was the first service that is involved in this process and then the board decided to expand this opportunity to Mida Compliance Recorder too. It has been a win-win decision that allows both Mida and end-users (or partners) to take advantage of this assurance: being among the ISV who officially integrate their solutions into Microsoft Teams is huge evidence of how Mida’s services work.
Being on the list of these certified solutions for Microsoft Teams, respectively Contact Center and Compliance Recorder, is a demonstration also of our willingness to always carry out our mission of providing innovative technologies for all types of communication and continuously improving.
Why choose these certified solutions? Discuss your customer service needs with our experts and they will be happy to help you go deeper into these products and their features.
The new era of the fax server: an overview of its evolution and adoption
Do you think fax server adoption has drastically decreased in these years? We would like to change your mind because this communication management system is still a key component in some environments.
Over the years, it has developed into a modern solution and, according to the “Market Guide for Fax solutions” of the most important consulting firm, Gartner, its evaluation and implementation have increased by 5% per year, playing an important role in support of critical business communications processes.
How has fax technology evolved?
The traditional fax technology with a paper-based solution has gradually evolved over the years into a more sophisticated system in the Cloud. This new experience ensures reliable fax delivery over the Internet across any device avoiding the inefficiency and the slow process of the traditional one. The documents are securely stored in a centralized repository that could be integrated with the company directory or LDAP.
The evolution of the working landscape, due to the Covid-19 Pandemic, has accelerated this evolution increasing the requests for the cloud fax server as a more flexible solution that can be part of an all-in-one communication platform. Companies have faced the imminent need to move their UC to the Cloud and this change has involved also the fax solution.
Why are fax solutions requested?
Gartner has highlighted that the number of companies that use the fax server to manage a high volume of documents has remained unchanged, but in recent times, enterprises have found new cases of usage by integrating this technology with other communication systems (such as email, text, and SMS) and CRM. The main aspects to be considered by these companies when they are evaluating to adopt of a Cloud fax server are:
- cost-saving: the new solution enables decreasing the telephony usage costs related to physical fax lines (e.g. paper and toner), infrastructure, management, and maintenance costs. The cloud fax server does not require any fax machine or phone lines to deal with long distances, it just needs a PBX that routes the traffic of the faxes to the system. Fewer investments are needed than the traditional ones based on hardware. It works in the Cloud with centralized full control to streamline the paperless workflow and its effort;
- scalability, flexibility, and interoperability: it allows to easily increase and decrease the fax lines as needed without additional architectural investments.
- seat-less usage: this cloud solution is accessible from any device without geographical limitation. This aspect is essential in the current work-from-anywhere scenario. Wherever the agent is he can securely send and receive faxes. This aspect helps companies increase their efficiency.
- compliance and regulations: documentation privacy and security are essential topics to be considered when a company is planning to adopt a fax server. The cloud solution can efficiently address these needs (e.g. GDPR): for example, the administrator can set up a different level of access permission so only authorized users can access the portal and see only the specific documents they are authorized to handle.
- speed and accuracy: the Cloud fax server digitally receives, manages, and saves hundreds of faxes at the same moment, there is no busy signal. The virtual ports are always available and it is ever connected.
Which are the main markets that request the Fax Server?
The recent research of Gartner has highlighted which are the five industries that still continue heavily adopt the Fax Server to support other internal applications and processes:
- Healthcare - Fax technologies have been chosen in this industry for their cost-save and secure communication management to be integrated into their electronic medical record and electronic health record systems.
- Manufacturing - These companies integrate fax solutions in their current business processes (e.g. purchase orders system) to handle a high-quality automated service for transactions.
- Legal - In this environment, the main communications between lawyers, counsels, courts, and clients still go through the fax channel.
- Finance - Banks and investment enterprises still rely on fax solutions for high-security regulatory requirements.
- Governments - They continue using fax technologies to ensure a high level of secure communication.
Do you work in these markets and are you evaluating moving your fax management into the Cloud? Discover Mida Fax Server and go deeper into its main features you can rely on. You can easily track documents and securely automatically archived them in a reliable fax solution.
UC data analysis or customer surveys: how to boost your customer service?
Companies have figured out how essential is high-quality customer service for business growth. Providing a powerful customer experience by efficiently handling communications enables new revenues and encourages longstanding relationships.
The way your agents interact with your customers and how they deal with their needs is a crucial element for the customer journey: nobody would like to continue purchasing from a company that provides bad support.
A low-level service drives people to keep away from new interactions, indeed, but how can we avoid this problem? And how can customer service performance be improved to get happier customers?
The answer seems simple but this topic hides several aspects to be considered such as:
- choosing an all-in-one contact center solution for conversation handling;
- agents’ training;
- setting standards and procedures;
- creating valuable service team culture;
- analyzing customer feedback and UC data.
Both quantitative and qualitative data are useful to remove inefficiencies and turn service weaknesses into opportunities. Data is key to increasing the performance of customer service: planning data-driven strategic actions can drive meaningful changes.
What to bet on to get suggestions for improving your customer service: UC data analysis or collecting information through customer surveys?
Let’s go through these options to figure out which best suits your business needs.
UC DATA ANALYSIS
The information drawn from UC data analysis is more powerful than the surveys ones because these are impartial and immediate. Specific advanced software allows you quickly collect near real-time communications data and easily analyze them to create valuable insights to pin down common customer issues and be aware of how your service is performing.
Analyzing this data allows you to:
- understand your service weaknesses and know how to fix them - You can easily identify the main metrics, for example, how many calls are prematurely abandoned, the average handle time, and the average hold time in the queue, and exploit them to improve your queue management and call routing system;
- data can also point to important strategic actions, such as agents’ extra training, which are required to get a positive boost to your customer satisfaction;
- get a clearer understanding of buying process, and customer journey - Being aware of this scenario helps your agents to predict people's behavior and requests, and consequentially become more proactive during the interactions.
SURVEYS ANALYSIS
Turning customers’ feedback into actions to enhance conversations is an effective process: understanding what people think about your service helps to ensure a high-quality level but collecting these suggestions through surveys isn’t always as easy as it appears.
It could be a tricky challenge with some limits to keep in mind:
- considering who to interview and when;
- choosing the right survey model (e.g. through live calls, email, forms) with appropriate questions and answer choices;
- being aware that not all are keen to share their thoughts and experiences by filling out surveys;
- understanding how to analyze survey results and turn them into worthy data in an appropriate time interval;
That’s why many companies prefer to first look over conversations data with professional analysis tools, even if this means not having the direct thought of the consumer as with the survey open questions.
Companies have already increased their budget to improve more in customer service through data analysis and they are already seeing the benefits, are you ready to do the same?
Drive the change by adopting a professional analysis solution, click here to know how Mida contact center analysis solution can help you.
Choose Mida Attendant Console for Zoom to empower your customer service
Following the huge request for communication and collaboration tools, Zoom has evolved its platform by adding new important features to allow users easily handle live chats, webinars, and phone calls. Behind the decision to grow its business beyond high-quality video conferencing, there is the aim to provide a reliable all-in-one solution for efficiently connecting people worldwide. During the Pandemic Zoom usage went up and, in recent times, companies all over the world have shown an interest in choosing this platform for handling all business conversations.
Mida understood this trend and decided to ride the wave of the moment and invest in UC solutions for Zoom by adding to its portfolio a new Attendant Console to empower Zoom users with professional call features.
This application allows customer service agents to smoothly handle a high volume of incoming calls from any location: manage PSTN and Zoom calls, transfer PSTN calls to Zoom users and transfer Zoom calls to Zoom users or to PSTN is easier with this turnkey UC software. Multiple calls can be simultaneously routed to multiple service queues and handled through an easy-to-use web interface, accessible from any device (PC, Mac & tablets) just by entering user credentials. All the console configurations are maintained to encourage the work-from-anywhere current scenario.
With this solution, agents have complete control of the call flow and call history and they have access to a centralized directory. All they need is at their fingertips to save staff time. Mida helps agents to deliver a higher service by streamlining their activities and increasing customer satisfaction during their interactions with the company.
Mida Attendant Console for Zoom is available as a basic version for receptionists’ activities and as a more sophisticated one with voice channels, an unlimited number of queues, selective queue login/logout, and additional advanced features and redundant configurations for High Availability. Both solutions are easy to activate and quickly to set up and support hybrid deployment easing migration to Zoom from Legacy PBX.
Check out this page now to get more information about Mida Attendant Console for Zoom and feel free to fill out this form to speak with our experts. They will come back to you shortly to let you discover which solution suits you best.
License Mida UC applications in a new way: simple and flexible!
In recent years, people are used to activating as a Service licenses to easily get Cloud-based software with a ready-to-use web interface. This licensing method has become very popular for its no required specific technical expertise: it allows to quickly license plug-n play services on a time-bound subscription basis.
In the UC market, this approach allows companies to cut costs by activating only the number of needed licenses and adding/removing UC applications as required. With a monthly or yearly subscription fee, companies can take advantage of a scalable and modular UC solution, without high initial capital and stressful thought: maintenance, updates, and safety aspects are off-loaded to the provider.
This method seems to be very attractive but sometimes enterprises may feel limited with the standard proposed solutions because they cannot 100% meet any peculiar requirements. That's why some IT Managers prefer to adopt a customizable solution, but is it possible to get a more flexible and easy-to-use UC software that meets specific needs by activating an aaS license?
Mida has its answer…
Having understood the huge potential of the aaS licensing model and the relevance of meeting different companies' requirements, Mida has decided to propose their UC solutions for Microsoft Teams and Zoom environments a step ahead.
Mida’s products - including a contact center, attendant console, and compliance recorder - are now available with off-the-shelf and dedicated instances to let companies implement a new corporate telephony system. In accordance with their business requirements, they can decide where to host the applications:
- In Mida’s Cloud - Mida handles the infrastructure in its Azure and gives customers only access to the turnkey UC services. The activable UC solutions are ready-to-use and intuitive to efficiently handle and store business communications without stressful technical expertise. This is a good option for small companies that haven't an IT staff or prefer to offload the deployment and the configuration process.
- In the companies' Cloud - Mida sends customers a step-by-step guide that covers the initial part of the components’ deployment (e.g. Virtual Machines, SBC, licensing). The process depends on which component(s) the customer wants to license and which architecture has been chosen. Three architectures were available: they are specifically designed to combine the simplicity of aaS model with the flexibility of customizable solutions (contact us to get more information about the main differences). After the initial deployment, Mida takes care of the configuration of the component(s) the customer wants to enable.
In both cases, companies can quickly activate licenses and smoothly use the products. The philosophy behind these two methods is to help enterprises move their business communications to the Cloud with a simple and turnkey UC solution and a periodic payment of use.
Want to know more? Speak with our expert and discover which method is right for your company scenario.
Relying on UC applications has never been so easy!