Fuze recently hosted its productfest 2020, which showcased newly launched products and revealed future innovations. The session began with a briefing from Clément Wehrung, a Product Management executive at Fuze, who discussed the company’s Fuze Integrations Ecosystem which launched in May. This features a portfolio of enterprise-grade, secure integrations. He also highlighted the Fuze Developer Center, which provides a hub for innovation, and will be adding many new APIs over the coming months.
Wehrung then revealed Fuze’s updated integration for Microsoft Teams that is designed specifically to simplify the experience for end users.
“This new update enables more efficient communications with access to new dialpad features and complete directory access,” he explained. “The presence sync really enables you to save time, and you don’t have to have information about each app, it just works with one click access via the Fuze extension button”
Wehrung concluded his presentation by detailing Fuze’s major updates for Google Workspace, including the introduction of an extended solution which supports Gmail and Google Calendar natively. That solution also works on mobile devices, which are increasingly utilised by people working from home or in remote locations.
Hadi Chemaly, a Group Product Manager, then presented on the topic of improving the experience of joining meetings. “The key to satisfaction is a low barrier to entry with a secure, no download approach,” he said, pointing out that Fuze Meeting Join Support is achieving a more than 20% improvement in successful meeting joins among users.
Chemaly added that Fuze has several further innovations coming including immersive screen share and increased video feed capacity to provide a richer experience for sessions that have larger numbers of video users but also need to present users’ screens attractively. He also highlighted developments in the Fuze Contact Center offering, before sharing a demo.
“We’re very excited about Fuze Contact Center and we have had very positive feedback to date,” he said. “We have new enhancements to add value on the supervisor side, like additional alerts and agent search, because the experience has been centred around queues but we want to promote better coaching applications focused on the agents. We’ve also introduced a detailed view for agents, giving them more information and visibility. In addition, we anticipate a gradual return to office-based call centres and we want to support supervisors by providing them with a view of information on tablets, for example. This will provide greater richness of data to supervisors and enable enhanced coaching.”
Chemaly also previewed two new features designed for non-contact centre employees; in-app call monitoring outside queues and virtual pick up of group calls, both of which are designed to provide advanced PBX functionality accessible through the Fuze app.
Colleen White, Director of Product Management at Fuze, then detailed Fuze Hub, the company’s customer administration tool and the new Star Ratings Visibility feature. “When you have users in many different locations it makes it hard to triage what an issue might be,” she said.
“With this solution we can find users from a group of what we call silent sufferers and using this feature, we surface the qualitative data via star ratings, and don’t just rely upon quantitative data, like MOS, which does not always represent a user’s experience. The data provides an opportunity to see how users are doing and ultimately enable predictive maintenance”
Finally, Tim Laughlin, a Network Engineer for Customer Connectivity, detailed how Fuze is addressing the market’s needs for resilient and flexible connectivity. He turned his attention to the hot topic of SD-WAN and explained that the company has added four new SD-WAN partners; Aryaka, Cato Networks, 128 Technology and Silver Peak. These have been added in order to support various interpretations and deployment decisions with regard to SD-WAN.
“The SD-WAN hype cycle is rampant with 30-35 providers and constant acquisitions,” he said. “However, there is no RFC standard so there are lots of different strategies. For that reason, Fuze is focusing on providers who utilize network peering, but will invest in hosting customer appliances in our data centres for providers who don’t, it’s not just a cookie-cutter solutions, our alliances are there to give customers choice.”
Laughlin went on to detail how the company is also accommodating customers who bring their own carrier (BYOC) and growing its footprint for private network hosting. The company currently participates on 10 internet exchanges and 2 SDN platforms, manages 6 Technology Alliances with SD-WAN providers, and is on-net with 4 MPLS providers, ensuring a wide range of options for customers.
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