We’re often told that “eyes are the window to the soul.” While it’s undeniable that looking into someone’s eyes creates a powerful connection and gives us reams of information about how they’re feeling, did you know that, even more than sight, sound is probably our most powerful sense when it comes to empathy and connection. We’re a culture that loves to text, send emails and write, but the human voice conveys thousands of pieces of information that can be intuitively understood.
Considering this, it’s pretty great that we have an entire department that specializes in Voice services – along with a TON of other communication tools – and it’s been newly rebranded Unified Communications!
The lowdown on Unified Communications:
Between our recent acquisitions and the increased demand for Voice products, our Unified Communications (UC) department has grown by leaps and bounds over the past several years We even have a development team dedicated to ensuring these tools stay ahead of the curve.
So, what does Unified Communications mean? Unified Communications is, mostly, software based and includes phone, VOIP, video calling, instant messaging, analytics, transcribing dialogue in text and more. It’s clear that, especially because of the pandemic, these complicated communication systems are vital to most businesses.
The UC team follows alongside the customer journey, from start to finish, ensuring the best product solution and service for each unique business requirement. This process can be broken down into 4 steps:
Finding the best solution
The UC Team assists our sales exec’s pre-sales by helping design, demo and pilot the solution we think will work for our potential customer. Gone are the days when you just plugged in a phone and away you go. Many of our customers (especially those using our Trader Link Network and Turret Phone) need sophisticated systems that get them instantaneously connected – so they can “buy, buy, buy” or “sell, sell, sell” when it comes to stock trading.
Delivering with care
Once all the design, engineering and customer engagement has been completed and the sale has been made, the UC team takes over to lead in the Service Delivery process. This includes managing the project’s implementation from start to finish, coordinating and provisioning the necessary hardware, software and circuits, as well as porting any phone numbers that the customer wants to re-use from their old system. The UC team also takes the time to train the customer and their staff on how best to use our solution.
Ongoing support
Of course, no sale is complete unless we include the ongoing support necessary and that part of the story belongs to our team of Tier 2 and 3 support staff. If something is amiss our amazing Support team jumps in, but if it’s a next level problem then UC’s team takes the baton to get us across the finish line. Many times this means they have to escalate to our vendors as it’s sometimes a bug inherent to their product.
Maintaining and upgrading our systems
The fourth pillar involves our UC architects who, as well as assisting in a support function, are working with our IT Systems team to ensure we can upgrade our Unified Communications systems efficiently and that we have no single points of failure (remember the Roger’s Outage?).
UC architects also ensure that the platform is healthy, software works great, and discs aren’t getting overwhelmed with content. Huge reams of data are created through these tools, as the protocols that underlie them read like an email with logs that detail the enablement of each and every session and interaction (but NOT the content of that interaction). This data is necessary for troubleshooting, so maintaining its integrity is key.
Looking into the future, we’re expanding our CLEC (Competitive Local Exchange Carrier) footprint so that we can offer our services in new regions. Like in everything Beanfield does, the goal here is for us to continue to own our destiny and grow nationally vs being reliant on others.
All in all, Unified Communications, like so many other departments, is on a pretty extreme growth path and is excited to become an even bigger part of the Beanfield family!
