Customers are now more willing to be experimental when it comes to the types of technology and services they adopt, according to Toby Gold, CEO of Callroute.
After the initial panic of the shift to remote working, companies have seen what they are capable of under pressure and are now more willing to adopt new IT software and models to ensure they can continue to be as productive in a hybrid working world as they were pre-pandemic, Gold stated.
“We’re seeing it with our customers that as hybrid working becomes the norm, the imperative has moved from survival to how they can now effectively emulate the type of collaborative environment that they had before,” he told UC Today.
“We’ve seen a move away from products like Zoom, which have a place but were driven more by personal experience to ones that have more corporate relevance, like Microsoft Teams, and we see some of the other traditional telephony players in this space really starting to play catch up. You’ve got this huge latent opportunity amongst the Microsoft Teams users and this need to apply it to this world of hybrid working.
“People are ready to experiment, they’re prepared to do some quite brave things that they might not have done before the pandemic”
Gold advised that providers should be aware that despite this willingness to experiment, customers will still want and need to take baby steps to do so – they do not want to abandon technologies that they have invested in for years, so service providers should deliver solutions that cater to the hybrid working world but also complement their legacy tools and systems.
He also warned that customers are growing tired of subscription-based licences.
“I think people are getting a little bit of subscription fatigue,” he stated.
“While they recognise that the services are likely to be paid for monthly, what they don’t want is to be locked into a plan that goes across their entire company and that’s going to require them to sign up for X number of years.
“For us, it’s important that somebody can start using our service within 30 seconds and that there’s no contract lock-in – you can join us and leave after a month if you want. It should be about adding extra users, turning them on, and enabling them, and it should encompass all the things that were important to us in the office, but now we can access those same capabilities from home.”
Gold acknowledged that telephony has become a “poor relation” in conversations about collaboration technologies in recent times, but he warned that companies can’t afford to neglect customers who still use the phone as their primary mode of communication:
“We accept that video communications is the norm, but what you can’t do is dictate to your customers how they choose to collaborate with you”
“For example, we were faced with a problem where we were called in by an online retailer and given one week to deploy a service to 4,000 users who were home working agents; the retailer thought it had a solution that would work and it didn’t because it suffered really poor voice quality. The typical user who would use the phone to order their groceries is likely to be older, so clarity of voice was absolutely critical, and the service had to be robust because people were working in a home environment.”
Callroute’s New Routes
Callroute was formed late last year by sipsynergy to address the challenges around Direct Routing. It specialises in building a UCaaS platform that automates the end-to-end Direct Routing set up, from SBC configuration through to number provisioning and porting.
The company is UK-focused, but Gold has plans to branch out to the US and make it a more widely available international solution as well as expand it out to other platforms beyond Teams, including Cisco Webex and Zoom Phones.
“Nearly everybody now is using a collaboration platform – Google, Microsoft, Cisco – and over 80 percent of those that are using these platforms want to connect them to their telephony service so that they can have one place that they go to that covers all of their collaboration requirements,” he elaborated.
“The demand is there but we’re seeing that people aren’t necessarily taking those collaboration platforms, like Teams, and turning the voice on at the rate you’d expect. There are probably more Direct Routing suppliers than there are customers at the moment, and we believe that one of the reasons for that is that people find it more difficult than they had expected to try the services out and deploy them. That’s an impediment [to Direct Routing adoption] at the moment.”
