For all the talk of multi-platform, multi-modal technologies in UC these days, there are still those who firmly believe the telephone remains top of the business telecoms tree.
Once such company is Natterbox. Based on the fact that two thirds of business interactions still take place over the telephone, Natterbox was founded in 2010 with a vision to reshape telephony services for the Cloud age.
UK Sales Director Ian Moyse explained some of the thinking behind Natterbox’s focus on the old school telephone.
“Many of the hosted Unified Communications players have ticked the horizontal boxes for breadth of function, but they lack depth of quality across all modes of communication, leaving customers less than pleased,” he said.
“Delivering consistently high quality calls anywhere in the world, so remote offices and roaming users can all benefit from one vendor’s platform, for example, is itself enough of a challenge. If a provider cannot achieve this for the fundamental phone call element, then layering chat, video and other comms over the top is not a smart move. It is one thing ticking boxes for the number of features you offer, but another to deliver the quality levels expected by users on any device, any time from anywhere.”
Customer experience
Not afraid to go against the grain of conventional thinking on hosted comms services, Natterbox has eschewed the broad vistas of the /unified-communications/ucaas model to focus squarely on delivering enterprise class cloud telephony. It has invested in building a single carrier network across Europe, North America, East Asia and Australia, and, as Ian explains, the driving factor behind its decision to focus on the Cloud is delivering excellence in service.
“An increased focus and recognition of the importance of the customer experience is driving businesses to explore any improvement and edge they can gain,” he said. “Website journeys are continually analysed for personalised and optimised customer experience, but phone journeys are not. They should be."
“Cloud telephony can empower these needs quicker, easier and in greater depth than any legacy telephony system and this is disrupting the status quo of many traditional telecoms providers. The Cloud has disrupted many sectors - take CRM, where 70 per cent of new systems sold are now cloud based. Telephony is experiencing the same market shift.”
The mention of CRM and cloud-based market disruption are no accident. Both are topics very close to heart for Natterbox. In fact, its innovative solution to the challenge of improving customer experiences through cloud telephony has been to combine a phone system and CRM into one. In its Advanced Voice Services (AVS) platform, it has the world’s first and only Cloud PBX and contact centre solution designed to be run entirely within Salesforce.
Ian firmly believes that this disruptive cross-fertilisation of CRM with business telephony will be widely imitated in the future.
“CRM integration with telephony is a rapidly expanding sector and those who can deliver the best and most effective linkage here are going to grow rapidly,” he said.
“The key needs of digital transformation include removing complexity, increasing agility & flexibility and improving user experience, for both internal & external customers. User expectations are at a higher level than ever seen before and businesses need to be agile and flexible to keep up with them. But for people to adopt the required changes and be supportive of the transformation, they have to recognise the added value and believe in the end goal.
