It’s been an exciting year for Fuze, being recognised as a UCaaS leader in The Forrester Wave, achieving the highest scores in many of the 31 evaluation criteria. We caught up with Fuze product evangelist, Bradlee Allen, to discuss the secrets of their success.
The customer is key
In a market where the core product functionalities are increasingly convergent, customer service is a key differentiator. “Being able to do voice, video and messaging is almost table stakes”, Allen explained, “so we attend carefully to the administrative aspects of it – how do you deliver the service to the end user in such a way that ensures that the customer has control they need. So it’s not just an “as a service” solution, managed and maintained by the vendor”.
As Forrester’s evaluation process includes in-depth confidential video interviews with customers, this commitment reflects strongly in the outcomes of the research, demonstrating a powerful alignment of vendor and user priorities.
“It’s about the customer adoption enablement structures”, Allen continued, “and how you help your customers, how you’re ensuring your they’re always happy, and ultimately how you’re providing the right level of service to the enterprise, which is a difficult juggling act for any business.
“But I feel that the fact that we got five star rating on this reflects that we did a fantastic job”
Managing the customer journey
With 13 years in the UC space, Fuze has adapted and responded to their customers’ changing requirements, being an early entrant to the subscription model because of the flexibility it offers.
“Some industries, such as finance and government, have complex compliance regulations. But we can show them, actually we can do the exact same stuff you do with your on-premises PBX in the cloud. So let’s show you how we do it, and actually how much easier it is for you. And how we can keep it just as secure as you do on-premises, in fact you can outsource that compliance to us”.
To maintain this competitive edge in customer service, Fuze is of course looking to a future where cognitive functionality is a growing part of the overall solution.
Bespoke intelligence
“When you think about it from a platform standpoint it’s always about having intelligent systems that can identify the way you the way your system needs to work. That’s something that we’ve been doing for some time, which is ultimately intelligent software that identifies network bandwidth expansion requirements, capacity, expansion requirements, response to network outages”.
And at the user level, they’re working with bespoke smart integrations which reflect the way different customers interact with the service according to their own business activities and priorities. “We have a team dedicated to building unique customer solutions, from CRM integrations to machine learning.”
“Rather than offering a cookie-cutter solution, we can build intelligent individual tools to provide the analytics they actually need”
Looking to the future, Allen foresees a time when thanks to 5G all the cables disappear from our desks the way the physical phones have largely already done… but where customer service remains fundamental. “Everything from the sales process through to implementation, and how you manage and maintain that happy customer every week, keeping a consistent rhythm.”
