As adoption of Microsoft Teams continues to gather momentum, extending its functionalities to become a true digital workspace for the future continues to be the goal for a growing number of diverse new users.
For contact centres, the transition to remote working — both as overnight response in the spring, and now as a long-term strategy — has not been without its challenges. Ensuring business continuity in unprecedented circumstances has meant finding new ways of doing things, under circumstances which may be changed forever. However, this has catalysed new partnerships, such as the collaboration between Ribbon Communications and Mida C3 — a solution which offers a complete suite of video and voice applications, including automated attendant, queue management, attendant console for receptionists, recorder and billing.
The location-independent contact centre
As Attilio Licciardello, Founder and General Manager at Mida Solutions, pointed out, “C3 allows Teams to have these functions integrated directly in its own cloud environment.” To make their call centre application suitable for distributed teams, additional functionality was needed, because this was a complete change to the way that contact centres traditionally operated in a colocated space.
“The Ribbon SBC gives us the resources and performance we need, to make the UI we wanted to offer, and helps us smoothly onboard new Teams users. Migration from Skype for Business to Teams is a big focus for Microsoft nowadays. And now that we’ve broken the psychological barriers around using collaboration tools, everyone realises that this is the future.”
That future can be deployed quickly too, as John Macario, Senior Vice President Global Channel Marketing for Ribbon Communications pointed out, wherever the call centre’s agents are distributed around the world. “Everything is deployed in the cloud, so there’s no requirement for anyone to go on site. Our SBC SWe Lite (which is in the Azure Marketplace) has a quick launch wizard, which means a new user can be up and connected in about 10 minutes — regardless of where they are.”
Perfect collaborators
“It’s a great partnership, between Ribbon and Mida, because both solutions are fully interoperable and can be spun up fast in the cloud. All the migration is conducted virtually and Mida solutions perfectly fill in some of the gaps that currently exist within Teams”
The installation reflects the ongoing improvement in the user experience which both partners and external callers enjoy — bringing the speed of Direct Routing to all functions within the organisation. As Licciardello reflected, “When the PBX is a legacy one, how do you manage an application like the receptionist, if you need to distribute an incoming call? You’ve got to have real-time presence. The cumulative delay is not acceptable if it takes time (even a couple of seconds) to know the status of each agent, cycling through each link in the chain.
“But we can do this through the architecture of Ribbon’s SBC now, and it means that the cloud-based system performs even better than the legacy one.”
So the future of the distributed call centre is sustainably underpinned by this partnership between Ribbon Communications and Mida Solutions, ensuring cloud-based continuity for customer support and sales in the new normality.
