Pridis CEO on the Importance of Modern Attendant Consoles

The pandemic has changed the way people across the world communicate with each other, and the way we interact with businesses no exception.

Tom Wright

The pandemic has changed the way people across the world communicate with each other, and the way we interact with businesses no exception.

Customers still expect a slick, easy experience when contacting a company – despite the chaos of setting up for remote working behind the scenes.

This transition has led to an explosion in the adoption of cloud-based platforms in enterprise communication, while many customers also want to engage with businesses using the tools that are prominent in their personal lives, such as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger.

The vast array of platforms has made the role of an attendant more important than ever, as well as the technology they use to perform the role.

“Attendants who need to be available at a remote location generally only need a good laptop and an Internet connection,” according to Johan van Oostveen, CEO at Pridis.

“At the back end, on the other hand, many different links and processes are needed to connect everything together. As an example, you can think of an on-premise telephone system where telephone calls need to be routed to a remote attendant.

“Then other challenges emerge such as transferring social media or chat conversations to an agent who is working remotely or seeing an agent’s availability before transferring a call.

“Because of this, company employees are looking for new and faster ways of communication.”

This is a space that Pridis knows well through its rich 25-year heritage in attendant consoles.

Its cloud-based Connecsy offering is compatible with leading industry names such as Microsoft Teams, RingCentral, Avaya, Unify, Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise, Mitel and Cisco as well as other methods of communication such as social media and email.

This is particularly important in a world where people want to choose how and when they interact with a business, rather than be confined to a phone call between set opening hours.

The Power of Teams

Microsoft Teams has been one of the standout success stories of enterprise communication through the pandemic – to the point where other leading vendors, often competitors, are building integrations into the platform.

This creates an added layer of complexity which Connecsy can help simplify, van Oostveen said.

“The integration possibilities are endless with Microsoft Teams,” he explained.

“There has been a huge change in the international market over the last 18 months, which triggered a call for smart unified communications solutions; there are numerous solutions, but most companies have shifted to Teams because it’s widely available in Microsoft 365 packages.

“We actually always try to be a few steps ahead of the market, which is why we integrated Microsoft Teams well before the Covid outbreak. This has allowed us to stay somewhat ahead of market demand.”

Hybrid Work and Beyond

The move to remote working was nothing short of dramatic last year, with offices across the world left empty as people stayed at home.

But things have now become more complicated, with some employees in the office, some at home and some working on the move. This creates a big challenge in terms of interconnecting different solutions into one central hub.

“You’re dealing with third-party software, where the protocols of each application may be different,” van Oostveen said, “but you still have to find a way to make them work together anyway.

“Communicating between apps is getting easier because many protocols are already standardised, and we use the APIs that vendors make available to connect platforms.

“Connecsy is, therefore, the ideal solution, we combine all these business communication channels within one convenient application. This leaves the complex integrations at the back end and allows the end-user to experience the ease of use at the front end, anywhere in the world.”