Mida confirms the interoperability with Patton eSBC for Teams Direct Routing
We are happy to announce the recently tested interoperability between our UC applications for Microsoft Teams and Patton Electronics SBCs certified for Direct Routing in Microsoft Teams.
Just a few weeks ago Patton has publicly announced they obtained the certification for interoperability with Microsoft Teams: the Patton SmartNode eSBC series has been certified by Microsoft for Direct Routing, a feature that enables the SBC to act as a connector between Teams and any SIP or PSTN services.
Patton is a long-lasting US manufacturer of UC, cloud, and IoT enabling solutions. Its mission is to provide high-quality and right-priced solutions, networking & access, and Industrial Connectivity products and services for customers worldwide. They have been Microsoft partners for many years, and the certification of the eSBC series for Teams came as a natural continuation of it, also considering the increased demand for Teams integrated UC applications in general.
“With a Patton session border controller Teams solution, organizations that use Microsoft Teams can choose with confidence any business-class telephony calling service they prefer,” said Marjan Torkar, President EMEA and CEO Patton-Inalp, “with no worries about interoperability delays during implementation or troubleshooting headaches during operation.”
Patton’s Microsoft Teams session border controller and Microsoft Teams gateway allow Teams users to employ an external SIP or PSTN communications service provider for external phone calls while obtaining the benefits of the UC platform. Mida C3 Cloud Contact Center for Teams- the Connected contact center by Mida- interoperates smoothly with Patton SBCs, empowering the agents with the advanced call management features they need, directly within their Teams environment.
“The certification of our Smartnode SBC series for MS Teams Direct Routing extends the scope of our solutions and allows partners like Mida Solutions to enrich their offer for collaboration services and Unified Communications for Microsoft Teams," said Gilberto di Pietro, regional sales director at Patton.
“This new partnership is a win-win situation for our joint customers: the tested interoperability between our systems removes any technical complexity, allowing them to focus just on the operational aspects of their new contact center solution in MS Teams.” added Marco Cortese, co-founder and President of Mida.
C3 is a product already available for enterprises worldwide and is included in the Connected Contact Center for Microsoft Teams Certification Program. This process we’re about to complete is an additional guarantee that the solution we’ve created for Teams provides customers with the quality, compatibility, and reliability expected from Microsoft solutions.
Want to know more about our partnership with Patton Electronics and Direct Routing for Microsoft Teams? Find out more on this page.
5 crucial contact center KPIs you need to track
Contact center is the place where most of the first interactions between your company and your customers take place. As per in-person meetings, you probably won’t have a second chance to make a good first impression. That is why it is crucial your agents have the right competencies and the appropriate tech applications to ensure top-quality support to customers, solving their issues quickly, possibly exceeding their expectations.
Giving due weight to contact center KPIs can help you to meet this challenge and increase customer satisfaction.
Which are the 5 Contact Center KPIs you must measure for success?
Let’s analyze together the most important KPIs you need to keep under control to provide your customers with an outstanding customer experience:
1- Average Handle Time (AHT) - is a metric that measures the average amount of time an agent spends on a call with the customer. It comprehends both the time spent actively on the conversation with the caller, the total hold time and the after-call work, that is the post-call processing. AHT varies according to customer issues’ complexity and to the time the agent uses for the after-call actions (e.g. write notes, scheduling follow-up, update colleagues). This KPI is fundamental, as it contributes to painting the portrait of how the service is performing.
AHT = (Total talk time + total hold time + after call work time) / total number of calls
This measure can be an indicator of the agents’ performance but not necessarily the shorter the AHT is, the better the quality of the service: if an agent is more concerned on closing tickets rather than solving issues, its performance will be poor, even with a lower AHT. With that said, there are several best practices you can adopt to reduce it:
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- implement a contact center with a queue management service that efficiently routes calls to the most appropriate operator, according to the call distribution algorithm that best suits your business’ needs;
- plan an appropriate training for operators, to put them in a position where they can solve customers' requests directly, reducing hold times during the conversation;
- make sure your contact center is integrated with your CRM software. CRM integration empowers agents as they can read customers’ record history and add their additional notes in a few seconds.
AHT is one of the most important key indicators for agents' performance because, in an ideal scenario, the issue should be solved before closing the conversation. This leads to the second KPI of this article.
2 - First Call Resolution Rate (FCR) - FCR measures the number of customer interactions that your support staff is able to resolve at the first time of asking. FCR is an indicator of your support service quality because it is proof of your agents’ ability to immediately meet customers’ requests.
The higher your FCR is the more satisfied your customers are: consider that 82% of people say they decide to change supplier because of poor customer support. To increase your FCR you can follow the advices of the previous point because, as shown before, the two aspects are strictly related. Keep in mind also that lowering FCR you will not have the same customers calling a second, or a third time, so you will save in customer service costs.
3- Average Hold Time in the Queue - This key performance indicator measures how long the caller is placed on hold in a queue before being served by an agent. People don't like the boring waiting time when they call a company/call center: 35% of customers will hang up the call after 1 minute of waiting and two-thirds will hang up after 3 minutes. Minimize the waiting time is essential for customer satisfaction so we advise you to:
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- choose how many agents should be active at the same time according to the average volume of calls you receive, considering a margin to deal with high peaks.
- adopt an IVR (or Automated Attendant) to welcome callers in the best way, guiding them through pre-recorded audio messages, to the most appropriate service queue.
- invest in an advanced queue management system to route incoming calls and transfer them to the caller's desired extension (or department) without the need for a human operator. In this way your agents will receive only calls that need a human interaction, minimizing also the number of transferred calls.
Please keep in mind that Average Hold Times should not be confused with the time people are put on hold by the agent during a conversation to search for additional information or data, useful to solve their issues. This is another KPI you can track and analyze to improve your agents’ performances.
4- Call Abandonment Rate - There could be many reasons why customers abandon calls: it can be related to how you designed the queue, how much time the caller is placed on hold (as shown before), how many times the call is transferred, and also to the operator’s performance. The percentage of calls hanged up before being served or before the issues being solved is a key indicator of your support service quality. To reduce this rate you can:
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- reduce hold time in the queue (as shown before in bullet #3);
- train your agents properly to solve specific requests without transfer the call or place the call on hold;
- optimize your welcome messages to give key information and take advantage of the voice menu;
- optimize call flow routing to assign calls to the right department and the most appropriate agents.
5- Transfer Rate - This KPI is indicative of agents performance and of call routing: if it is a high number this means that your agents are not able to solve the issues customers call for, either because they have no efficient training or the calls are assigned to a wrong operator or department. We suggest you to go deeper into this, as understanding why so many calls are being transferred, can spotlight refinements points for your customer service.
Analyzing these KPIs allows you to have a clear view of your support service performances and quality and it gives you some crucial suggestions on how to plan a strategic business plan to improve it..
To go deeper into these 5 KPIs, check their expanded definitions on our website on the Knowledge Hub section.
Direct Routing vs Calling Plans for voice in Microsoft Teams
In the last year, CIOs and IT Managers have been forced to adopt new cloud communication and collaboration tools to allow remote and hybrid work. 80% of managers say they expect more flexible work-from-home policies even after the pandemic emergency passes and most employees say they want to keep the freedom to decide whether to work from the office or remotely.
In this scenario, Microsoft Teams is an all-in-one UC solution that comprehends chats with content sharing, online meetings, webinars, and phone calls in a unique platform. Its simple and intuitive user interface is winning over people’s hearts as it makes smart-working super easy, integrating the most requested UC features.
But what about VoIP calls in Teams?
Let’s analyze here the two main options available now to convert Teams into a business phone system connecting it with the PSTN: Direct Routing and Calling Plans.
Both approaches are effective, but how to choose the best solution for your company? We’ll get into it below.
Microsoft Direct Routing
In this first scenario, using a certified SBC and a SIP Trunk you can connect Microsoft Teams with the PSTN without violating any existing contract with the public telephony network.. This allows you to route calls from and to the PSTN directly in Teams, which becomes your new phone system. This model is much more appealing for companies that want to keep the flexibility to choose their own provider while integrating with other enterprise systems.
This solution makes the migration to Teams a breeze, avoiding a large amount of stress and pressure a company-wide migration will generate under your IT department:
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- It leverages your existing infrastructure
- The deployment is simple
- It is compatible with the analogue devices
- All your old numbers are ported in Teams
- It is cost-effective compared to Microsoft Calling Plans
- It gives you large flexibility and the external support given by an external provider to which you have entrusted yourself
- It is available worldwide, with no Country restrictions
Its lack of geographic restrictions and the cost-effective pricing make it the option preferred by multinational companies, though it can be a good choice also for SMBs that aren’t in the list of countries where Microsoft Calling Plans are available (as detailed below).
You can choose between three different hosting options:
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- customer hosted in Azure: it has faster deployment than on-prem SBC and an excellent network between SBC and Teams Service
- customer hosted: it is less fast to deploy but the advantage is that you have the control on how it fit
- carrier hosted: the SBC is hosted in the service provider’s cloud to let you focus only on your business and not on the backend technical aspects. It allows a quality solution that could combine multiple carriers. It is as simple as deploying a normal SIP Trunk
Plus, it’s two birds with one stone: with Direct Routing you currently can use third-parties applications to empower your customer service, adding advanced features to Microsoft Teams native call management options. You can convert Teams into a professional cloud contact center thanks to - for example - a customized IVR and queue management software or the advanced contact center analytics.
Microsoft Calling Plans
This second alternative is a Microsoft native solution: acting as a voice provider, Microsoft gives you a phone number and a PSTN service with a bundle of minutes for calls. No additional infrastructure is needed but provisioning users, assigning numbers and porting all of your existing numbers is all your responsibility.
Some points have to be highlighted in this case: it takes almost 24 hours to obtain a new number and almost 2 weeks to port an existing number in Teams, but keep in mind that no integration with Legacy PBX is possible.
A quick and simple deployment and activation allow you to easily handle external calls without any stress because Microsoft manages entirely, via Office 365, a per-user-per-month plan. You don't have to choose your own third-party carrier. Microsoft offers directly different licenses, with an amount of minutes allocated per user per month for outbound voice traffic (inbound calls are free), to transform Teams into a hosted PBX:
- Three Domestic outbound plans: 120-minute, 240-minute, and 1200-minute (3000-minute for US, FR and CA)
- One plan for 1200-minute (3000-minute for US, FR, and CA) domestic calls and 600-minute for international outbound calls
If you want to choose this solution you must be aware that it is not available worldwide ( 16 countries are on the list now - other 8 are in the roadmap) and also, due to Microsoft’s own strict calling plans’ guidelines on carriers, there’s not much room for negotiation. Talking about pricing rates, thought for Direct Routing there is no one-size-fits-all, you can say that from a per user per month perspective DR is almost always cheaper than Microsoft’s own Calling Plans.
These limitations can or cannot impact your decision especially if you run a customer service with many agents who daily handle a large number of ad outgoing calls, especially to international locations...
Following these considerations, what is the best solution for you?
Please keep in mind that we've been developing UC solutions for more than 15 years, so if you still have doubts or simply want to talk with one of our consultants, just book your slot here!
5 must-have features of a WFH contact center
This last period has been unlike any other: restrictions caused by the pandemic have widely affected everybody’s lives and people had to move basically everything online: from their social life to purchases and work. This has also changed the way people interact with companies online, and their expectations towards customer services: people are now more anxious and less patient and they expect their problems to be solved immediately or in the shortest possible time.
Companies had to adapt and enhance their customer service to meet these new needs and changed behavior, also because recent surveys highlight that this global shift to online is here to stay. Moving the entire workforce work from home (WFH) is a big challenge, but there are some cloud contact center must-have features that can help operators perform their job at best also when working from home:
- Seatless option – this is THE must-have feature of a modern contact center. The web-based console allows maximum flexibility: your staff will always work using the same familiar platform, both when working remotely and from the office. This must also have a simple and intuitive UI to help agents to better manage their daily tasks and efficiently handle a large volume of calls. Everything they need must be available in the cloud and just a click away.
- Ready/Not Ready option – being able to manage the presence manually, when needed, is really important: agents need to be able to set their presence status during working hours. If the agent sets himself/herself as not available, no more calls will be received until he/she changes the status again, putting it back in ready mode. This helps to reduce missed calls and also helps to reduce daily stress level, allowing operators to temporarily log out from a queue if needed (e.g. to take a short break or to open the door to the delivery guy)
- Interactive Voice Response and Queue Manager – the ultimate goal of customer service is to help the caller solve his/her issue in the shortest possible time. An IVR could make the difference in achieving the goal before getting them in line with operators. A professional automated attendant can guide clients to the shortest path to obtain the information they need, or to the most appropriate expert available. This avoids long and irritating waiting times. Moreover, thanks to specific call distribution algorithms decided by the company, each call can be served by the most skilled agent available, the agent who has been idle for more time or other criteria.
- Integration with CRM – a contact center must be the key hub of all the interactions between the company and its customers. Having and managing all customer information quickly during a phone call is essential for agents to better understand requests, leave tracks of them and maintain every stakeholder within the company informed on how the service is performing.
- After Call Work (ACW) function – agents must have a specific amount of time after the interaction with a customer to make administrative activities, e.g. scheduling follow-up contacts and actions, sending communications to other stakeholders within the company, etc. This helps them to keep track of all the precious information collected during the call with the customer.
As shown in a recent survey by Claromentis, almost 73% of UK workers want to have the freedom to decide whether to work from home or from the office after the Pandemic.
Keep in touch with us to discover Mida cloud contact center solutions or just to obtain some professional suggestions to improve your UC allowing remote and hybrid work.
Microsoft Teams Updates - Spring 2021
Microsoft Teams has left its competitors so far behind that it is likely to be soon recognized as the most used collaboration and communications platform worldwide.
The odds are on its side: in October 2020 Teams had 115 million daily active users and in the latest 6 months this number has increased by 30 million. From the business perspective, CIOs and IT Managers have become aware of this platform’s potentialities, also from the Unified Communications perspective, thanks to the integration with third-parties applications.
Do you know what’s new in Microsoft Teams? Let’s summarize in this article the most interesting updates:
Meetings
Due to this particular historical period, we are all still forced to avoid in-person meetings and meet colleagues and customers online. Microsoft is working hard to enhance the meeting experience and make it simpler and more appealing. Here’s the meetings news:
- meeting link available directly in the calendar: inviting people to join a meeting has never been so easy thanks to the meeting link which can be copied and pasted into any conversation;
- automatic meeting recording option: a dedicated notification on the screen automatically warns attendees the meeting is being recorded. This avoids forgetfulness, allowing you to keep track of all your important meetings and watch them on-demand in the future;
- “Meet now” button: lets you easily create and start an instant meeting directly from your Teams or Outlook calendar;
- Live reactions (e.g. like, love, disappointment) and new intelligent Polls suggestions helps to increase attendees' interactions also from mobile devices;
- Prevent uninvited people: this new additional setting allows to decide which people can join the meeting directly bypassing the lobby and who cannot. You can decide that some people could join the meeting immediately (e.g. people in your organization) while other participants would have to wait in a virtual lobby before being accepted into the session;
- Recap of meetings: if you miss the meeting or if you were late, a recap of the meeting is now available in the meeting chat tab for all participants to easily catch up on important information. This is useful in a business environment but also in schools and universities to help students studying with recordings, transcriptions, shared files, chats, and so on. Transcription could also be very helpful for people with hearing disabilities;
- “Pick-up slides” option enhances your performance letting you resume the speech from where you left due to an interruption;
- Even if a breakout room has just been opened, now you can reassign participants to the rooms (previously you could only do that when rooms were closed). This is useful for efficiently managing discussions and putting the right participants in each breakout room;
- New attendee microphone settings: new flexible management of participants' audio allows you to prevent interruptions while you are presenting webinars, or to unmute participants (this was only allowed when their hands were raised).
Calls
Microsoft Teams always try to exceed call experience expectations with additional features to help users handle communications in the simplest and more efficient way:
- Voice-enabled channels can now connect a call queue to a channel in Teams allowing agents to collaborate sharing information with each other while answering the calls in the queue;
- If there is a network outage, the Teams client can now continue to place and receive PSTN calls thanks to a Survivable Branch Appliance (SBA) without any interruptions. This is very useful to support critical communications.
Additional general features
There are also other features that soon will be available, that are related to the improvement of collaboration among colleagues:
- Easier connection between SharePoint and Teams with the possibility to choose to include libraries, pages and lists in your Teams tabs;
- Simpler file sharing thanks to a dedicated link to each file stored in Teams;
- Quickly translation of posts on channels and chat;
- Easier set up of your out of office status with automatic replies;
- Easier email sharing from Outlook to Teams;
- Create tasks related to a specific message directly from Teams chat and channels to schedule follow-up actions.
iOS
Microsoft Teams is working to make available and efficient also from iOS devices these updates:
- Customizable background;
- Meeting controls available in the Mac Touch Bar;
- Safari users can now share outgoing video in web meetings;
- Now iPad users could be chosen as an external presenter in Live Events in Teams.
Keep always under control the Microsoft Teams news on our site to be sure you never miss the latest updates!
To find out how you can implement a contact center for MS Teams in your infrastructure, please visit the Microsoft Teams’ session on our website or consult the Products pages to discover the advantages of our Teams solutions: C3 Cloud Contact Center, Attendant Console, and Recorder.
Customer service: expectations in the post-pandemic era
2020 was a particular year that shook the global economy revolutionizing rapidly the way people live their lives. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, people have been faced with many different restrictions, such as social distance, closed shops, and remote work, that have impacted their physical and mental state and also the life-work balance. All these aspects contributed to make people more anxious, cautious, and frustrated, and -as a result of restrictions - all their activities moved online increasing their demand for immediate and efficient customer services.
How has customer service changed from early 2020?
Customer service has rapidly become the most crucial part within the product/service experience. Understanding customers’ current state of mind and resolving their issues immediately or in a very short time has become the main challenge for most companies.
When people were not allowed to move, the traditional in-shop experience failed and the customer service department absorbed the subsequent increased demand for online support. This changed the customer experience (CX), and recent surveys and research say that this is likely to be an irreversible changeover.
Coronavirus pandemic is still affecting our lives and it isn’t easy to predict how long it will take for this situation to be solved. Fortunately, many companies understood that pandemic was about to change customer habits and reacted consequently adapting their customer service to the new reality. Maybe for the very first time, they gave due weight to agents’ experience (AX) and understood agents' wellbeing makes the difference in a contact center: a happier staff makes a customer feel more valued.
That is why companies have now widely adopted UC applications that make work easier for their staff, especially when working remotely, decreasing their stress level and empowering their work.
“If you can't have empathy and have effective relationships, then no matter how smart you are, you are not going to get very far.”
Daniel Goleman
How to enhance AX and CX?
“Ok, but what should I do to make both my customer service more empathetic and my team more satisfied?”. Here are some tips:
- The complexity of your service must not be perceived by your agents: while speaking to customers, your agents should be able to easily connect with their supervisor, access the customers’ records or do any other action required to get the issue resolved. The technology behind the scenes is something that can boost your customer service, but cannot interfere with your agents’ workflow. That is why it is important for you that your contact center solution helps your team perform at best through customized IVR, CRM integration, collaboration platforms. The IVR feature, for example, filters incoming calls making sure that when customers get the line they are speaking with a representative from your company that can really help them solve their specific issue.
- Make sure you have a dashboard where agent’s metrics are collected and available for you to analyze. This is very important to keep agent’s productivity under control and step in as needed when your team needs help
- Support your teams: make agents feel connected with the company and they can count on you when they are in trouble. You can achieve this with internal communication tools or activating some support features in your contact center like, for example, the barge-in option.
- Trainee your team: it is very crucial that beyond their ability to provide technical support, they improve their active listening skills, as maintaining a positive and proactive tone with customers influences the way they perceive the service. If agents show empathy, customers can rate your service positively, even if you were not able to solve their problem immediately.
Automation is helpful as long as it is not at the expense of human relationships. You can invest in intelligent technologies and automation to help your service instantly answer FAQs, but remember don't overdo it with automation. In this particular historical period, human interactions are rare and therefore valued.