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TCI Makes Mitel Access Control Easy – Improve Your Building Security from Your Phone

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Much has been written about protecting customer and employee data, but what about protecting your customers and employees from physical threats?

Even more than a secure network, a secure facility provides peace of mind and protects customers and employees from bad actors who would do them harm. For that reason, security cameras have become standard equipment at schools, hospitals, hotels, and other businesses where the front and back doors represent a front line of defense.

There are dozens of security camera manufacturers today, ranging from inexpensive doorbell cameras to high-resolution surveillance cameras. While this freedom of choice gives businesses more flexibility, exterior cameras are often “outsiders” regarding business communications systems.

Specifically, organizations struggle to incorporate these video feeds into their broader unified communications (UC) platform, instead managing them as separate solutions. This can mean toggling back and forth between different screens and applications at a time when split-second decisions may be required.

Guard the Door While Sitting at Your Desk

Imagine, for a moment, how much easier it would be if you could manage building admissions right from your phone. Live video could be displayed directly on your video phone when someone approached your doors, with a live audio feed to communicate with them, and a pop-up button on your phone could either lock or unlock doors and even send out a notification to employees, students, or local police/fire departments in the case of an emergency. Well, a solution like this is no longer limited to the realm of imagination — it’s a reality that Mitel MiVoice Business customers can enjoy today.

The Mitel Access Control solution was developed in response to a clear need from our customers to integrate security cameras with their UC platform and IP desk phones. Offered as a customized solution through TCI and Mitel Professional Services, the Access Control setup integrates any H.264-compatible phone that uses the real-time streaming protocol (RTSP) with Mitel 6900 IP Phone Series, MiVoice Business, and, optionally, Mitel Revolution mass notification system. Together, these components create a new solution to the age-old problem of guarding the gates against intruders.

Our solution improves communication between visitors and staff and assures the security of your employees, customers, and students. You can view, talk, and take action from your Mitel IP phone.

Let’s look at an example of the Mitel Access Control solution in action:

  • A visitor arrives at the front, back, or delivery door and rings the video doorbell camera.
  • This triggers a call to the receptionist’s IP phone.
  • The phone’s video screen displays a real-time video feed with text indicating which door is the source of the call, and a voice connection is made.
  • After a brief conversation, the receptionist may choose to open the door via an on-screen button or, if they feel danger is imminent, they can select the “evacuate” button to notify security or emergency services and, if they have Mitel Revolution, send out a mass text notification to a distribution list right from their IP phone.

Stay Ahead of Potential Threats

The Mitel Access Control solution is just one example of how TCI and Mitel Professional Services can combine different technologies to create a unique solution to a specific problem. In developing this solution, Mitel extended the functionality of its existing products by integrating them with third-party solutions and services.

On the Mitel portfolio side, MiVoice Business ties voice, video, and messaging together, the Mitel 6900 IP Phone Series supports real-time video feeds and touch-activated prompts, and Mitel Revolution supports text-based messaging for emergency and non-emergency situations.

Beyond those components are third-party products that TCI and Mitel Professional Services can bring into your UC environment, such as the video cameras, screen-capture software (e.g., VLC media player), SIP-enabled remote access control system, application server, and local alarm service (e.g., F24).

TCI and Mitel can turn your IP phone into a security command center that controls communication, identification, and notification by tying everything together.

Contact your local TCI team to get started: (703) 321-3030 or GetHelp@tcicomm.com.
 

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

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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

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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

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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

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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.
 

Mitel Delivers New Tools for Users of Microsoft Teams

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One of the most startling statistics to emerge from the pandemic had nothing to do with communicable illnesses but rather with communications between businesses.

In 2020, from March to June, the use of Microsoft Teams grew by 894%. And, between 2021 and 2022, the number of Teams users rose from 145 million to 270 million. Microsoft Teams has become the de facto communications platform for over one million organizations in just a few years.

This is, of course, good news for Microsoft. And it’s also good news for businesses already paying for Microsoft Office who essentially got a business-class collaboration platform for free, at least initially. But for companies who continued to rely on traditional telephony and vertical industries where video collaboration wasn’t the norm, Teams had some feeling left out.

Fast forward to today, and these customers face the prospect of evaluating Teams phones, taking on E3-E5 licensing and SIP-trunking costs, and they are finding that Microsoft Teams is not free anymore.

It’s a significant incremental uplift in expense for existing capability. Simply put, there isn’t an excellent way to tie legacy voice systems and Teams together without spending more money on additional phone licenses or introducing extra layers of complexity. Until now…

Mitel Delivers New Tools for Teams

For clients who have previously decided to adopt Microsoft Teams, Mitel recently announced a series of tools and applications that seamlessly integrate Mitel’s enterprise-class telephony features with the MS Teams platform for a single, robust communications and collaboration solution.

For example, suppose Teams users choose to activate the phone licenses available on Teams. In that case, they can now enjoy direct routing that connects with Mitel endpoints through certified session border controllers (SBCs), providing a unified telephony framework (albeit with fewer features) that can be controlled from the Teams environment.

What if Teams users don’t want to purchase Microsoft phone licenses? In that case, they can still integrate their telephony system with Teams through Mitel’s Telephony-only client available in MiCollab and enjoy all the robust telephony features that Mitel offers.

This is part of Mitel’s MiCollab offering and can be turned on with a simple toggle switch. In addition, Mitel Assistant is available for free on the Microsoft app store and delivers Mitel softphone capabilities to Teams users’ desktops as a floating app. Mitel Assistant allows you to make and transfer calls, search directories, set speed dials, import contacts, activate three-way conferencing, and more – all from your Teams screen.

Mitel also offers presence integration between Teams and Mitel telephony users, allowing Teams users to see whether a colleague is on a PBX-based phone call – even if that colleague doesn’t have a Teams client. A user’s phone status is visible from their Outlook emails and can help determine direct routing of calls to the next available user.

With these Mitel tools co-existing with Microsoft Teams, a uniquely elegant hybrid solution evolves, taking advantage of premises or private cloud solutions from Mitel’s MiCollab with a cloud-based collaboration solution in Microsoft Teams.

Making Teams More of a Team Player

Microsoft Teams is great for many things, from video meetings to sharing documents. But many businesses still need high-quality telephony applications to run their business.

Schools and universities, for example, rely on mass notification via mobile devices to notify students, staff, and parents of emergencies. Financial services companies must maintain inbound contact centers supporting call recording and other advanced telephony features. Retail businesses need to connect workers on the sales floor to customer service applications via telephone to help customers in real-time.

Let’s look at two more industries to see how Mitel plus Microsoft Teams can help businesses run better.

Healthcare – Consider a network of healthcare facilities. They use Teams for video collaboration between facilities, but what about emergencies where a doctor or nurse needs to respond when they’re not near a laptop? Telephony services can provide the critical link to life-saving answers in seconds. Or what about mobile service workers who are responsible for things like security and cleaning? Telephony apps keep them connected to colleagues with maximum efficiency.

Hospitality – Another sector that can benefit from a telephony-enhanced Teams environment is the hospitality industry. Hotels may use Teams for internal meetings or drive customer engagement, but telephones still play a critical role in their daily life. Guests rely on in-suite phone services to contact staff and receive messages. Cleaning staff can use those same phones to indicate when a room is clean and available for new guests. Combining those communications with Teams enables hotels to stay connected to colleagues and customers from one platform.

Phone calls, SMS notifications, and contact centers still play a vital role in many organizations, but most businesses don’t want to manage two separate communications and collaboration platforms.

With Mitel solutions, they don’t have to because the telephony functionality can be integrated with their overall communications experience, whether they’re collaborating in Teams and need to make a phone call from their laptop or desk phone or browsing the web and want the simplicity of click-to-dial automatically from any phone number.

Contact your local TCI experts to learn more about integrating your Mitel solutions with Teams: (703) 321-3030 or GetHelp@tcicomm.com.
 

DC Region’s Extreme Weather & Stronger Storms… Protect Your Business with Cloud & Business Continuity Planning

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TCI’s cutting-edge Disaster Recovery solutions are tailored to help protect your entire IT environment – from data and applications to office computers, mobile devices, networks, and phone systems.

Will your business continue to operate when disaster strikes?

Here are just some of the ways TCI’s comprehensive approach helps you safeguard what counts:

  • Determine appropriate risk reduction strategies, remedies, and alternatives for critical systems and networks, including affordable ways to address voice and data protection measures like off-grid power sourcing and secure off-site storage.
  • Enable a remote work program that can keep your business open when your office is shut down during an emergency.
  • Avoid critical data loss or recovery delays dealing with missing databases, disrupted systems, networks, and more.

And if you’re considering moving to the cloud, remember you don’t have to do it all at once.

Create a plan. Identify what should stay in-house and what should go to the cloud. Focus on what you’d need to operate if a major interruption or disaster occurred. Determine the connectivity your employees need to do their jobs remotely. Also, work toward consistent and seamless end-to-end communications. TCI can help you build a hybrid or full cloud solution that meets your business needs.

The cloud gives your company the agility it needs to respond to any disruption, be it a natural disaster, pandemic, security breach, or a failure of your network or hardware.

Schedule your Business Continuity planning session today. Contact TCI at (703) 321-3030 or GetHelp@tcicomm.com.
 

Connecting Healthcare Providers with HIPAA-Compliant and Cloud-Based Communications

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As a local technology leader, TCI is committed to delivering the best HIPAA-compliant healthcare communications tools for your facility.

The entire healthcare industry underwent a rapid digital transformation due to the pandemic and continues to evolve as the world changes.

Telehealth, remote treatments, and virtual patient services have grown in popularity, enabling patients to receive care outside the traditional clinical environment.

Healthcare providers are embracing the latest communications technology to keep up with their patients’ evolving digital-first expectations – and many are already taking advantage of the Cloud to achieve healthcare benefits.

The Key Benefits of Cloud-Based Healthcare Communications

  • Enhanced Data Security and Compliance – Hospitals and other providers are among the biggest targets of hackers and ransomware due to the sensitive data they must store and transmit. Patient information is more secure in the Cloud, protected by encryption and access controls. TCI offers Cloud-based UC solutions that are updated continuously to comply with the latest privacy and security standards, including HIPAA and GDPR.
  • Scalability and Flexibility – Healthcare systems with Cloud-based UC solutions can seamlessly transition to remote operations and manage increased volumes of patients during a pandemic or short-term crisis.
  • More Cost-Efficient, Effective Processes – Private and hybrid Cloud communications solutions reduce infrastructure and maintenance costs using digital rather than physical storage. Integration with medical apps streamlines complicated processes. Time-consuming administrative tasks can be automated for improved operational efficiency.
  • Advanced Analytics and Insights – Cloud-based UC solutions can use powerful predictive analytics tools for data-driven decision-making.

All aspects of your healthcare communications can be elevated to the Cloud, such as:

  • Contact Centers
  • Patient Portals
  • VoIP Phone Systems
  • Video Calling and Voice Messaging
  • Collaboration Software and Teamwork Solutions
  • Text Alerts and Reminders

Take Your Healthcare Communications to the Cloud with TCI & Mitel

TCI deploys HIPAA-compliant Mitel solutions that empower your clinical staff to spend less time on administrative tasks and more on critical care by supporting streamlined workflows, seamless file sharing, and API integration.

Innovations like AI-enabled automation, self-service tools, and virtual assistants will increase patient engagement, trust, and satisfaction with their healthcare experience.

To future-proof your healthcare communications, look for the deployment model – private, hybrid, or public Cloud – that best fits your clinical needs, data security requirements, and budget.

Contact your local TCI experts to learn more about migrating your healthcare communications to the Cloud: (703) 321-3030 or GetHelp@tcicomm.com.
 

TCI Host Service – Customized Contact Center, Team Collaboration & Business Communications

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Empower your people to serve your customers better

For a single, low monthly price, you can upgrade old phones to advanced mobile-enabled desktop phones and use Mitel’s award-winning capabilities to dramatically improve your Customer Experience.

Cloud communications isn’t an all-or-nothing endeavor

There are several deployment models to choose from depending on your business’s unique situation, and you can shift from one approach to another over time. Managing a multi-site business? TCI Host can bring your offices closer together.

In and Outbound Contact Center / Call Center

Whether you’re a small or big business, you can support omnichannel queues that let customers contact you the way they prefer. Track your customer contacts and get real-time metrics for informed decision-making and better team coaching.

  • Integrate with your CRM, like Salesforce, Microsoft, and others
  • Offer Live Agents, Web Chat, Email, Text Messaging / SMS
  • Monitor and respond to Social Media feeds (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc.)
  • Automate and access Full Reporting on Your Customer Interactions
  • Improve Customer Experience
  • Become more efficient

Powerful Collaboration Capabilities

Explore some of the Mitel-powered team-building and conferencing tools your users can tap into with their mobile or desktop phones…

  • Virtual workspaces for team meetings, conversations, content review, and project management
  • Team Video Conferencing and Recording
  • Participant management
  • Desktop application sharing
  • Team and private chat
  • Web-based file sharing
  • Document management

Unified Messaging and Integrated Apps

With access to these Mitel-powered tools, your team’s work can be tackled on more devices from any location:

  • Integration with business applications from tech leaders like Microsoft and Google
  • Presence Tools
  • Softphone App on Mobile Devices
  • Unified Messaging
  • Remote control of desktops
  • Outlook client plug-in
  • MS TEAMS integration (Mitel Assistant App)
  • Message retrieval from one synchronized message store

Our TCI Host Cloud Voice Service is all about flexibility

Add new cloud-based tools to your existing business phone system, and when you’re ready, migrate your entire platform to the cloud to reduce your overall telecom costs.

Schedule your TCI Host demo. Call us today at (703) 321-3030 or GetHelp@tcicomm.com.
 

Simplify the Banking Experience to Earn Customers for Life

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In the DC region’s highly competitive financial services industry, banks must ensure customers enjoy an easy and efficient experience at each journey stage. There’s simply too much risk that poor experiences will tarnish the bank’s reputation, turn away customers, and harm the bottom line.

Today’s communications solutions and technologies empower banks to break down unnecessary walls between their internal processes and customers. With these barriers removed, banks have new freedom to increase transparency, build trust, and foster personal experiences that help them earn customers for life.

Engage in Meaningful Interactions Every Step of the Way

To engage each customer more effectively in the right way at the right time, banks must seamlessly blend digital and human interactions. According to McKinsey & Company, banks that shifted to a more integrated, multimedia approach to customer communications have had convincing results, including:

  • Double the number of digital sales to customers
  • Three times more success in cross-selling bank services
  • A 40% increase in customer activities with the bank
  • One bank even reduced its cost to serve customers by two-thirds.

How to deliver technology-driven Banking Experiences that streamline every step of the Customer Journey:

Make it Fast and Easy to Navigate the Process

Initiating a new loan application with a bank can be very intimidating for people, especially when it’s their first time making a significant purchase, such as a house. They’re unfamiliar with the bank’s processes or what will be required.

When customers can easily set up a new account online and apply for a mortgage in minutes, it helps alleviate stress. User-friendly online forms and virtual agents answering questions along the way can efficiently step customers through the application requirements.

To further accelerate the process, customers can upload supporting documents such as bank statements and identification documents without leaving the user interface.

Connect with Customers their Way

Even with the most intuitive online forms, helpful virtual agents, and proactive communications, your customers sometimes need the reassurance and conversational exchanges that a person can best provide.

While AI is fast and helpful, customers want to communicate using their preferred media, which can mean connecting with a human. Collaboration apps put personalized text, voice, and video communications with bank agents at your customers’ fingertips.

A conversation may start with a voice or video call. Those communications can be followed up with text and email messages that provide additional support and links to more information.

Provide Timely Updates and Guidance

As the loan application moves through the bank’s internal processes, it’s crucial to keep customers informed about its progress and help them take full advantage of technologies that further accelerate the process.

When customers instantly receive text or email notifications confirming their application has passed through each process stage, the bank builds confidence. When customers can track the status of their application in real-time through a secure online portal, that trust is further strengthened.

Providing support and guidance is essential. This support can include walking customers through the steps to provide electronic signatures and providing clear, easy-to-follow instructions to access the bank’s secure online portal.

Timely communications will help customers successfully navigate their digital interactions without a trip to the bank or triggering a delay in their application.

Deliver Exceptional Banking Services with TCI

When banks and other financial institutions dramatically simplify their services, they eliminate many of the unknowns and fears around banking processes for their customers.

TCI takes the same approach when helping its local customers choose, deploy, and integrate the communications solutions and technologies needed to deliver exceptional banking services. It’s one key reason DC Metro banks and financial institutions trust TCI to help make their customer experience vision a reality.

Together with our Mitel-powered financial services solutions, TCI provides everything required to deliver the seamless, personalized customer experiences described above, including:

  • Secure, end-to-end Unified Communications services
  • Contact center solutions that incorporate advanced technologies, such as Google Cloud Contact Center AI and desktop co-browsing capabilities
  • Electronic signature solutions
  • Biometrics solutions for secure identity verification
  • Multimedia collaboration and meeting applications
  • Integration of communications solutions with the third-party applications banks depend on

If your bank is looking for communications technology that will support your efforts to earn customers for life, contact TCI today at (703) 321-3030 or GetHelp@tcicomm.com.