The vast majority of people have seen a change in their working role over the last 18 months – but attendants, the role was evolving even before the pandemic.
Increasingly, attendants have been asked to take on more responsibility as technology allowed them to do so – but the pace of this change has undoubtedly accelerated over the past 18 months.
It is the ever-evolving nature of an attendant’s role that forms the foundation of Pridis’ Connecsy console.
Connecsy Cloud integrates with the Microsoft Teams and RingCentral platforms, as well as platforms powered by RingCentral such as Avaya Cloud Office, Unify Office and Rainbow Office.
Its primary focus is to enable attendants to carry out all the tasks that fall on them with maximum easy, according to Pridis Consultant Ronald Wijnands.
“The main focus of our application is to provide attendants with everything they need to be able to do their work as efficiently as possible,” he said.
“Most attendants have a dual function; they handle the phone, but they might also be welcoming people when they arrive at the office.
“We want to present them all the information they need – such as the schedule of their colleagues, if they’re available and on which device or the information about which customer is calling”
Connecsy Cloud is the sister product to Connecsy Enterprise, which sits on-premises. It is available in an as-a-service model via a desktop application, with a web client set to launch next month.
The Connecsy Cloud console connects into Teams and RingCentral using APIs, meaning that all of the traffic is handled by these two platforms, rather than Connecsy itself. Pridis is also working on expanding the console’s compatibility to other UCaaS offerings.
Wijnands said that Connecsy stands out from its competitors by integrating with multiple platforms – whereas most others tend to focus on a single solution.
The platform gives attendants access to voice, email, chat and SMS communication to employees and lets them create their own templates to help speed up some tasks.
Cybersecurity is also higher up the corporate agenda than it has ever been but the challenge of staying secure was made more difficult last year when people were forced to work from home on consumer networks. This while all while GDPR remained an essential compliance across Europe.
“Security is an important aspect and being able to have a secure connection between the home office, the office itself and the platform,” Wijnands said.
“One of the main focuses for us has been making sure that we have all those connections safe, secure and encrypted – with users being able to login using the credentials from the cloud platform itself.”
Attendants Becoming Agents
As noted above, many attendants are taking on extra responsibilities – particularly in a hybrid work where employees are dispersed.
Pridis noticed that some attendants have been acting as a first port of contact for customers on multiple channels, Wijnands explained, particularly as customer experience via chat continues to grow in popularity.
This has led to the introduction of a routing function that will direct chat conversations to the first available attendant – as opposed to 1:1 chat channels that will go to a specific user.
“More and more customers are getting used to chat,” Wijnands said. “Certain chat communications are routed towards call centres because they’re trained for that, but we have also added a chat feature that is routed to attendants.
“You can open a chat channel towards a receptionist and it will look at which receptionist is available – for both employees and customers.
“If you are a small company without a call centre, this customer chat channel can be routed towards attendants.
“Then if you are a larger company with three attendants, for example, just one of the attendants will receive the message and they can handle it; you don’t have to target it to a specific person.
“The advantage is that they can handle for instance WhatsApp messages next to calls within one application”
The role of the attendant is vastly different to how it was 18 months ago – but technically is enabling the evolution to happen effectively.
