AI and Your Phone System… The Good, Bad and Ugly

/0 Comments/in /by

We expect the evolution of AI to be as earth-shaking as the creation of the semiconductor, the personal computer, the Internet, and the mobile phone. AI will change the way people work, learn, travel, get healthcare, and communicate with each other.

Evolving phone systems will be just one aspect of its far-reaching influence as AI revolutionizes industries and our society.

Where will AI take UC?

“2024 may well be the year of reckoning for AI. So far, the main application of Gen AI has been with chatbots and voice-enabled bots. The real value is transitioning from front-end chatbots to ones that can act based on their process inputs. The next step will be for customer support software to go beyond just answering questions and move toward enabling true end-to-end task automation.”
– Martin Bitzinger, Mitel SVP, Product Management

AI will improve customer service in phone systems in several ways, including:

  • AI-supported Contact Centers: AI will reduce the likelihood of human error with improved user satisfaction, shorter call times, and more accurate information for callers.
  • Personalization and Customer Satisfaction: AI-powered systems will enable businesses to provide more personalized responses, leading to improved caller satisfaction rates.
  • 24/7 Availability and Quick Response Times: AI will allow for round-the-clock availability of virtual assistants, leading to quick response times and improved customer experiences.
  • Automated Call Transcription: AI call transcriptions will enhance call quality assurance, aid in targeted training of new representatives, and help identify key service trends and recurrent issues, ultimately improving customer service.
  • Chatbot-Based Customer Support: Web-based chatbots powered by AI will enable customers to find solutions without calling customer service, thus enhancing the overall customer experience.

More powerful smartphones

Companies like Google, Qualcomm, and Apple are heavily investing in AI to evolve smartphones, with a focus on generative AI, which can create new content and provide personalized recommendations based on text and image inputs.

Trouble Ahead

The use of AI in phone systems won’t be without its challenges. Scammers are already using AI to clone voices, making phone scams more sophisticated and believable.

Experts recommend adopting a “code word” system with your loved ones, always calling back to verify the situation, and setting social media accounts to private to prevent publicly available information from being used against individuals.

AI-enabled phone scams have raised concerns about the increasing threat of advanced phishing and targeted scams, prompting more calls to regulate the use of this powerful technology.

Let’s explore new ways to leverage and safeguard the technology in your business. Contact us today at (703) 321-3030 or GetHelp@tcicomm.com.
 

Winning the Race – 3 Reasons You Can’t Let Your Communications System Fall Behind

/0 Comments/in /by

Like winning athletes, high-performance companies are always looking for new capabilities to help them beat the competition.

We’ve all watched high-performance athletes lose a race by mere fractions of a second. It’s heartbreaking because whatever the margin, it meant the difference between winning and losing.

The business world isn’t much different. Competition is extremely tight in almost every industry. It’s too easy to be left behind by competitors who are faster to market, work more efficiently, and do more to keep their customers happy.

Your business systems are crucial to increasing your competitive edge and winning the race, no matter what industries or markets you serve. Every system you rely on must reliably operate at peak performance levels — especially your business communications system.

You can’t afford to let your communications systems fall behind for many reasons, but here are three important ones.

1. Seamless Communications Accelerates Time to Market

It takes unconstrained teamwork across every area of your organization to get new offerings to market faster. Every member of every team needs the ability to quickly and easily connect, collaborate, and share information from anywhere, at any time.

If your communications system isn’t up-to-date, your teams can’t leverage the latest features and functions available in the web, mobile, and desktop applications they rely on to stay connected. Like high-performance athletes, your teams need every advantage they can get. No matter how seemingly small that advantage is, it makes a difference – especially if you multiply the effects across your organization.

Keeping your communications system up to date means your teams always have the most recent voice, messaging, video conferencing, screen sharing, and file sharing capabilities at their fingertips.

2. Lost Productivity is More Costly than You Think

A Grammarly Business survey of over 1,600 business leaders and knowledge workers found that 72% of the workweek is spent on communication and collaboration. When you add up the lost time, those inefficiencies cost more than $1.2 trillion, or $12,000 per employee annually.

But productivity losses aren’t only measured in dollars. Almost half of the survey respondents also said that inefficient communication and collaboration had created friction with co-workers and other departments. While those losses are more challenging to quantify, no business can afford them.

Communication technologies and systems that provide more features and functionality are crucial to making communications and collaboration more efficient. The capabilities that were cutting-edge just a short while ago are no longer at the forefront of what’s available.

3. A Great Customer Experience Depends on Great Communications

Customers’ communications with your organization are central to their experience, increasing revenue. The key is to ensure your customers have a great experience at every touchpoint across your organization. To do this, you need to look beyond your contact center technology and the service your contact center agents provide and take a holistic approach to the customer journey.

Every single person in a company plays a direct or indirect role in determining whether it provides consistently good or consistently bad human or digital interactions. Your business communications system plays a significant role in those human and digital interactions.

When evaluating the current state of your current communications system, think about how customers interact with your sales team and employees located at remote sites. Also consider how your internal teams connect and collaborate to deliver on customer requirements, especially when customized solutions are required, delivery dates change or supply chain issues slow down processes.

If your communications system doesn’t provide the capabilities needed to ensure customers have the best possible experience, they can become disillusioned. Worse, they may stop calling.

To maintain your edge to beat the competition, schedule your Business Communications planning session today. Contact TCI at (703) 321-3030 or GetHelp@tcicomm.com.
 

Shields Up in 2024 – Recommended Cybersecurity Guidance for DC Region Organizations

/0 Comments/in /by

As the nation’s cyber defense agency, CISA helps organizations prepare for, respond to, and mitigate the impact of cyberattacks.

CISA’s Shields Up campaign is a heads-up to every organization—large and small— to adopt a heightened posture when it comes to cybersecurity and protect your most critical assets against disruptive cyber incidents. Important recommended actions to protect your organization include:

Reduce the likelihood of a damaging cyber intrusion

  • Validate that all remote access to your organization’s network and privileged or administrative access requires multi-factor authentication.
  • Ensure that software is up to date, prioritizing updates that address known exploited vulnerabilities identified by CISA. Details: https://www.cisa.gov/known-exploited-vulnerabilities-catalog/
  • Confirm that your IT personnel have disabled all ports and protocols that are not essential for business purposes.
  • If you’re using cloud services, ensure that IT personnel have reviewed and implemented strong controls outlined in CISA’s guidance.
  • Sign up for CISA’s free cyber hygiene services, including vulnerability scanning, to help reduce exposure to threats.
  • Leverage CISA resources at https://www.cisa.gov/resources-tools

Take steps to quickly detect a potential intrusion

  • Ensure that cybersecurity/IT personnel are focused on identifying and quickly assessing any unexpected or unusual network behavior. Enable logging to better investigate issues or events.
  • Confirm your entire network is protected by antivirus/antimalware software and that signatures in these tools are updated.
  • If working with Ukrainian organizations, take extra care to monitor, inspect, and isolate traffic from those organizations; closely review access controls for that traffic.

Ensure you’re prepared to respond if an intrusion occurs

  • Designate a crisis-response team with main points of contact for a suspected cybersecurity incident and roles/responsibilities within your organization, including technology, communications, legal and business continuity.
  • Assure availability of key personnel; identify means to provide surge support for responding to an incident.
  • Conduct a tabletop exercise to ensure that all participants understand their roles during an incident.

Maximize your organization’s resilience to a destructive cyber incident

  • Test backup procedures to ensure that critical data can be rapidly restored if the organization is impacted by ransomware or a destructive cyberattack; ensure that backups are isolated from network connections.
  • If using industrial control systems or operational technology, conduct a test of manual controls to ensure that critical functions remain operable if the organization’s network is unavailable or untrusted.

By implementing this guidance, you can make near-term progress toward improving cybersecurity and resilience.

We also recommend a visit to www.StopRansomware.gov – a centralized CISA webpage providing ransomware resources and alerts.

If you’re not confident about how secure or compliant your Voice communications are, TCI can help. Call us today at (703) 321-3030 or GetHelp@tcicomm.com.
 

Contact Center 101 – Understanding the Basics

/0 Comments/in /by

There are plenty of companies that manage lots of customer interactions that could benefit from today’s contact center solutions, yet they’re not looped in on what’s available today. If you’re one of them, your business could be missing out.

What’s the Difference between a Contact Center and Your Organization?

A call or contact center is any facility that receives or transmits a large volume of phone calls. Whether it’s inbound, outbound, or a virtual call center, the traditional definition of the contact center has expanded as UC technology continues to evolve.

Contact center operations can range from a few customer service representatives in a small business to enterprise-level corporations with hundreds of agents spread across multiple regional offices.

Why Does Your Organization Need Contact Center Technology?

The modern contact center has evolved. Today, a contact center can be a small team managing internal help-desk requests, a car dealership connecting prospects to salespeople, or an elementary school office handling an influx of calls from parents.

If your organization handles frequent calls, then you’re a good fit for this affordable technology…

  • Unleash Your Sales, Service, and Support Potential – Start a different conversation with your customers when you give them the freedom to interact with you the way they want (voice, text, chat, video) on any device, and give your employees the tools to manage today’s omnichannel customer journeys.
  • Build a World-Class Customer Center – Don’t just connect with your customers, convince them you care with Mitel’s omnichannel suite featuring workflow designer, speech-enabled IVR, speech analytics, quality and performance management, real-time dashboards, and more.
  • Get Big Results Fast – Improve your customer satisfaction scores, first contact resolution rates, and customer effort scores with Customer Experience solutions.

What Kind of Call Center Technology is Available?

There’s a wide spectrum of call center solutions available to help your business operations. Today’s variety of call center solutions cover all the bases.

TCI’s contact center experts can step you through your options, and when you’re ready – design, deploy, and support your solution. Contact us today at (703) 321-3030 or GetHelp@tcicomm.com.