Today’s businesses can often find themselves with many types of communications platforms that their staff use.
Different modes of communications within the workplace can mean that not everything works together as seamlessly as expected. There are different components from different vendors, and these may not always work well with each other. For the uninitiated, getting these parts of the puzzle to work in a unified way can be a nightmare if you don’t have the right help from the right experts.
Not only that, modern business communications involve not just IP PBXs, but mobile, video conferencing, as well as integration with other business applications. So, how can a business reduce the complexity of its comms?
Shams Khan, Solutions Consultant at SCB Global (pictured, above), told UC Today in an exclusive interview that “…businesses, in order to take out the complexity of corporate communications, need to take a crawl, walk, and run” approach and cut down on the duplication of platforms.
Simplified communications
Khan said that businesses could simplify their comms by using Microsoft Teams alongside SCB Global’s OPTO4Teams. Many organisations complicate things by using multiple UC platforms. He said that “we can bring them greater value of collaboration from their existing Microsoft Office licenses that they currently use, as opposed to running dual platforms. OPTO4Teams runs in the background, enhancing the full feature rich experience of MS Teams.
He added that Microsoft Teams is fast becoming the collaboration tool of the future and the hub for teamwork that brings together chat, meetings and other Office 365 apps. OPTO4Teams takes that and adds SCB Global’s cloud PBX capabilities to Teams with more advanced features such as Mutli-level IVR, operator functions, Compliant Call recording such as PCI, MiFID II etc, Advanced Call Queuing, and Advanced Reporting with speech analytics, AI and worldwide calling plans to name a few.
Khan said that if businesses are using Office 365 and still have a separate telephony platform with the same features then they are running duplicate services and wasting both time and money.
“We can accelerate a business’s journey into Teams, enabling future-ready workplace by providing enterprise-ready global calling service, MS Teams certified DaaS (device-as-a-service), compliant call recording service with deep sentiment analysis and emotion detection systems,” he said.
“What we are doing is we’re trying to amplify that subscription and bringing that traditional telephone and communication element into that same environment,” he said.
“With OPTO4Teams they have a full featured, Unified Comms platform that they are able to utilise for all their office users”
Khan said his company can help organisations with design, deployment, and management. “We start by looking at a business’s requirements and start the journey that focuses on understanding those needs and discover what challenges there are and how we can address those with our telco experience. There could be complex number porting challenges, or complexity around migrating from existing PBX or UC platform to Teams”
Simplified onboarding
Onboarding can be done via proof-of-concept solutions, a free try-before-you-buy for 30 days approach. After that comes a phased migration to move business-critical services to Microsoft Teams. Khan said that way “de-risks” everything.
The company can also help overcome hurdles such as user adoption by providing proof-of-concept systems. Phone compatibility can be addressed by the provision of device-as-a-service (DaaS) to businesses as SCB Global works with all the major vendors who are Microsoft Teams certified.
The company can also help businesses move the Microsoft Teams system to them giving them a “single hand to shake” from Microsoft licences to the journey to a Microsoft-based UCaaS. He concluded,
“It’s an end-to-end lifecycle for the business from procurement and operations, right through to the solution implementation. That is the value we can bring to Microsoft Teams”
