Everything is moving to the cloud, and traditional service providers are getting in on the act in a big way. Indicative of this is the announcement from Toronto, Canada-based national telecom services provider TELUS, which has introduced not one but two new solutions aimed at helping Canadian businesses leverage cloud-based technology to improve how they communicate with their customers, employees and partners.
The two new solutions are:
Both products are powered by the Cisco® Hosted Collaboration Solution (HCS).
“For Canadian businesses looking for a competitive edge, cloud-based services can optimize employee productivity and improve customer service, while reducing technology expenditures,” said Peter Green, senior vice president and president of TELUS Business Solutions. “TELUS’ new cloud offerings eliminate the financial barriers to adopting best-in-class solutions, putting them within reach of businesses of any size.”
Here is a taste of what is in the offerings.
TELUS Cloud Collaboration: Enables businesses to deploy a comprehensive suite of state-of-the-art unified communication and collaboration tools to help their employees work more efficiently and effectively, no matter where they are.
Functionality includes: Call Control; Integrated Messaging from a single mailbox for voicemail, email and text messaging from a PC, mobile device or office phone; Instant Message and Presence; Desktop and Mobile App Access via the TELUS app for voice and video can be used on any computer, Android, or Apple device; Business Resiliency based on automatic backup service to 2 geographically-resilient data centers; Rapid Deployment of new capabilities via the TELUS portal; End user self-care whereby users can manage their own passwords, forward calls and add additional devices to their work phone number, reducing the burden on the IT department; and 24/7/365 service support.
TELUS Cloud Contact Centre: Exactly what the name implies, a feature-rich and scalable solution that allows businesses of any size to deploy the latest in contact centre technology.
Again the list of functionality is extensive. It includes: standard Skills Based or Precision Routing, voicemail queuing, Callback queuing, enterprise-grade IVR capabilities, customizable historical and real time reporting, Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) capabilities, a full suite of supervisory and administrative capabilities and advanced features such as Compliance Recording and Quality Management, Multi-channel skills based routing (Chat, email), and via complimentary offerings, Social Media integration and Workforce Management. TELUS also offers optional call centre consulting services to help customers define their contact center strategy, functional requirements and to assist with transition planning.
“By harnessing the possibilities of cloud technology, TELUS is providing its customers with innovative and cost-effective business solutions,” said Mark Kummer, vice president, service provider, Cisco Canada. “TELUS is proving itself to be one of Canada’s most customer-focused service providers and is at the forefront of helping businesses benefit from cloud services.”
Clearly as improving the customer experience has become a top, if not the top, priority of organizations large and small around the world, the interest in have sophisticated customer interaction capabilities is becoming competitive table stakes. And, for those watching the customer experience solutions market, you are aware that increasingly the cloud is the place customers, again regardless of size or location, are looking for solutions for a host of what know are demonstrable benefits.
The good news is that great markets attract competition and seeing service providers like TELUS go into both the Unified Communications-as-a-Service (UCaaS) and cloud-based contact center business is an indicator of just how important and attractive this market is. The other good news for customers is that it is always nice to have choices.