New ways of working have been on the enterprise agenda for several years but many have continued to operate using the same, office-based technologies until the COVID-19 pandemic has forced them to adopt new approaches. The unplanned nature of the shift towards home working has caused organisations to struggle to provide standard enterprise communications applications over consumer-oriented Unified Communications apps, such as Zoom, Teams, FaceTime and Facebook Messenger, among others.
Microsoft Teams in particular has been widely adopted by those working from home, in part because of the vast installed base of Office 365 users among enterprise users. However, while Teams is popular, it does not offer all the applications users need to perform their job functions. This has the potential to limit an enterprise’s productivity and cause it to provide a less than ideal experience to its customers.
“Teams doesn’t expose application programming interfaces (APIs) s for third party companies yet,” said Attilio Licciardello, one of the founders and General Manager of Mida Solutions, which has developed a range of applications that integrate with Teams to enable users with the functions they need.
“If you have a legacy system with your phones, you have apps and processes that are not available anymore if you move to Teams”
“There is no integration with applications so we decided to add out apps to this environment to allow the legacy world and the Teams world to work with apps that are not usually allowed.”
Licciardello explains that Mida Solutions’ apps are focused on two environments; Unified Communications and Collaboration (UC&C) and the critical communications market. Focusing on the call centre market he highlights the apps available for Microsoft Teams which include the newly launched Attendant Console as well as Mida Recorder, and C3 Cloud Contact Center, with Queue Management and Supervisor Console functions.
“Especially at this time with the pandemic situation, it’s important to be able to reproduce the office environment so managing calls in the same way as in the office can be done while at home,” explained Licciardello. “It’s vital to be able to receive incoming calls, manage them and route them to the appropriate people within the organisation. Our solution is able to manage that in the Teams environment directly.”
“There has been an evolution in the communications environment from the office to the home and people have realised that it’s now possible to have the same features of the office anywhere by adding to offerings such as Teams,” he added. “The wall that was in front of people because they didn’t have a deskphone away from the office is now gone. The evolution will now be very rapid to environments where communication is achieved by anything other than a deskphone.”
“It’s working and people like it so this new situation is going to last,” said Licciardello.
“With Attendant Console, we’re trying to complete Microsoft’s Teams offering to give users a professional communications environment in which they can have all the things they need”
“Attendant Console gives you features that the Teams environment cannot provide to ensure customers are served well and employees can answer and route calls with maximum productivity.”
