Call Recording: the 6 main benefits for your customer service
Call recording softwares are an important tool companies can rely on as they can often be integrated into cloud-based contact centers, ensuring that each conversation with customers complies with internal privacy regulations and/or corporate regulations. In addition to the compliance aspect, recording softwares can be used also for training purposes, playing a leading role in improving the customers’ experience with the company services provided by the call center.
Do you know the benefits of this UC product?
Let’s analyze together call recording advantages.
What is call recording?
A recorder is a software that allows the capture of voice and, in some cases, also video communications using VoIP. Which conversations have to be recorded can be set according to the needs: total recording records all conversations, selective recording captures just the types of conversations identified by administrators, on-demand recording allows operators to manually start the recording when needed.
Recorded files can be digitally encrypted for security reasons, and the storage repository may differ according to the type of recording software you are using.
The recording software can be integrated into an existing contact center or it can be available as a stand-alone application (as said before, for example, for compliance reasons).
Why is call recording so important for your business?
In some environments, companies are required to record calls for data protection and compliance purposes, but recording calls is important also for other businesses as they can all benefit from it. Why and how? Let’s analyze together how call recording can help you to enhance your customer service and grow your business, beyond being indispensable for compliance purposes:
- Improve customer service - Everybody knows the more your customers are happy with your customer service, the more likely they are to buy again from you. After being satisfied with the service, which quickly resolved their request, 50% of customers say that they would pay more for the product/service you offer (Hubspot 2021 customer service report). This important data confirms the relevance of good customer service in purchasing decisions and customers’ behaviors. The experience people have with your company impacts on the perception they have of your brand and on their purchase intention so it is good practice to analyze operators' conversations to find out whether they have handled requests satisfactorily. By analyzing these files you can understand if something goes wrong during calls and measure customers’ sentiment to discover also what they think about your brand and/or your products. For example, by listening to calls you can find out the reason why some calls are interrupted prematurely and how to prevent it. You can then plan strategic actions (e.g. establishing guidelines for the management of frequent problems).
- Understand weaknesses and strengths of your service and products - By listening to call recordings, you can identify which aspects of your service are strong, and which can be improved. By listening again to conversations you can also collect product feedback directly from your customers, even discovering suggestions that no one in the company had thought of before. This is an excellent opportunity to take the customer's point of view and use it to make sure that you are a winner over your competitors.
73% of people stay loyal to a brand if their customer service department is friendly with them and 54% of customers have high expectations of it (2021 Hubspot report).
- Know better your customer needs, preferences and behaviors - Listening to recorded calls allows your marketing team to know your customer base better by collecting some essential information such as common requests and needs. People feel less frustrated during calls if they perceive you know them well and you understand their needs. 72% of customers admit that they expect customer service to meet their needs and consider them as unique individuals (Hubspot 2021 customer service report) with personalized support.
- Increase customer satisfaction - This aspect is strictly connected with the previous one because when you know your customers you can exceed their expectations by providing an experience that goes beyond what they consider 'satisfactory', as shown before. For example, you could quickly solve his issues at the first call and make him satisfied with your good treatment if you know better his purchases, needs and requests. He will be happier!
When agents are required to take hundreds of calls a day, it is understandable that they do not always manage to take note of all the information. A recording system also allows agents, according to permissions that are configurable by the system administrators, to retrieve past calls to listen to them again and clarify any doubts. As a consumer, you know how unnerving it is when you have to contact customer service more than once, just because operators didn’t take note of information properly. On the other hand, this is also a great opportunity to be proactive in the following calls as agents can plan personalized follow-up by exploiting information obtained from the re-listening of conversations.
- Motivate your agents to increase their performance - Although it is quite disheartening to say, some people are at their best when they know they are 'under observation'. Knowing that they are being monitored can encourage operators to be more proactive, polite, and effective in successfully resolving the call. Moreover, recording analysis can be used for annual performance review and analysis: agents’ activities can be monitored using call recordings to be evaluated for performance-based awards.
- Coach your team and identify new ways to serve customers - Listening to call recordings you can identify best practices and worst practices in how agents guide the conversations. You can use these files with newcomers or employees for training purposes. Thanks to recordings you can analyse the performance of agents not in real-time to give them feedback and suggestions to provide a better service. This could be a win-win practice: agents will feel supported and motivated in their role and you will find -together with them- new ways to help customers. And your business will take advantage of it!
To know more about Mida recording software and go deeper into the adoption of a recorder contact us here. We would love to play a role in your new customer service!
Another big milestone achieved: Mida UC suite for Zoom
Mida UC portfolio is getting more and more enriched with new solutions: we are happy to announce that recently we have included in our offering contact center, attendant console, and compliance recorder for Zoom.
Since the second half of this year, we have seen a fast-growing interest in UC applications for Zoom, so we decided to work with Zoom engineers to integrate our technology with this platform, to provide Zoom business users with professional Unified Communications applications. Let’s go deeper into this news!
Zoom growing adoption
Thanks to its reliability and its intuitive user interface, Zoom adoption has grown exponentially in the last couple of years. It was the preferred communications and collaboration tool chosen especially by certain industries, like private enterprises, public sectors, and education, to overcome the problem of social distance during the Pandemic. Companies and schools quickly reimagined their daily tasks and moved all their interactions in the digital environment to easily connect people.
This year Zoom commissioned the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) to conduct a survey, which highlighted some key data regarding the future of business communications:
- 84% of the technology businesses interviewed say that “video conferencing solutions will continue to be essential for business operations beyond the pandemic”
- Among all the businesses surveyed, they expect over a third of employees to work remotely beyond the pandemic.
Mida new UC suite for Zoom
In spring 2021, also on the basis of inbound requests, we started scouting the technology approaches that could allow us to create a complete suite of UC solutions for Zoom… We are now happy to publicly say that we have enabled the usage of our contact center, attendant console, and recorder to enterprises using Zoom Phone as a communication platform. These new products are now available on a single virtual machine to ensure high-quality communication management. Mida C3 Cloud Contact Center was created to be a multi-user and multi-tenant platform ideal for service providers.
“Our mission is to provide enterprises with professional and complete UC applications, no matter the environment they are based in. Therefore the inclusion of Zoom suite in our portfolio is the natural consequence of the changes that have taken place in the communications industry over the last two years. This is certainly a project that we will continue in 2022, in direct collaboration with Zoom, so I look forward to sharing the next steps”, said Serena Rigato, Marketing Manager at Mida Solutions.
What can you rely on?
Getting better business productivity and enhancing customer service by having all your interactions, such as chat, virtual meetings, and call management, in Zoom is now possible!. Thanks to our new UC suite you can get the most from your UC by adding to Zoom basic call treatment capabilities Mida professional features, such as:
- customizable routing algorithms (e.g. skill-based, round-robin, idle-time),
- customizable IVR systems, advanced real-time and historical reports integrated with Excel and Power BI,
- integration with the main CRM platform (Salesforce, Dynamics),
- compression and encryption of recorded conversations,
- the intuitive Playback station, from which you can instantly retrieve, play or download files
Mida suite for Zoom will add greater flexibility to the customer service managed via Zoom Phone, allowing supervisors to:
- configure different services and for each queue
- assign agents to multiple queues
- define the most appropriate call treatment messages,
- easily change holidays messages, working hours,
- instantly and selectively define after call work for each queue or agent
and gaining more freedom for operators to be effective in managing their workflow, thanks to the possibility - for example- to selectively login and log out from the queues they are assigned to, or to set manually their availability status.
This is all for now, but if you want to discover more about these products please visit our Zoom dedicated page, or contact us directly by filling this form.
New Year, New Plans: Preview from UC Summit 2022
Mida will be among the sponsors of UC Summit, the UC Today’s annual conference and expo about Unified Communication and Collaboration latest news.
This virtual edition will be running between the 24th and 29th of January. Save the date on your agenda!
Why should you attend UC Summit 2022?
There are many reasons why you should attend this 5-day event:
- with free online registration, you can have access to exclusive sessions, speeches and insights to be updated on future UC scenarios;
- During these days you can visit the UC company's virtual booth, watch their experts being interviewed and download useful documentation.
- It could be helpful to understand what to expect from 2022 in terms of new UC applications. You will be able to make informed purchases or to drive your customers’ ones .
- UC Summit helps technology leaders to learn more about evolutions in the UC industry and know how to overcome new challenges. Industry experts will give a lot of food for thought to improve communication and collaboration.
What to expect from Mida?
UC Summit 2022 will be the occasion for us to unveil some brand new products and new features:
Mida UC Suite for Zoom
In response to the increasing popularity of Zoom, and the consequent growing demand from customers and partners, we have decided to make our most appreciated applications available also to companies willing to transfer their communications from legacy PBXs to Zoom Phone.
This new web-based and intuitive suite comprehends a complete contact center, an intuitive attendant console and a compliance recorder - all of them available in a single virtual machine.
The suite makes both agents’ and supervisors’ activities more efficient as it allows agents to promptly manage incoming calls, and it provides supervisors with advanced contact center functionalities and settings and key information on how the service and the agents are performing.
Compliance recording is included in the suite and is a powerful and professional recording application ensuring businesses to stay compliant with either privacy regulations and preferred internal call management protocols.
Mida Call Analytics
It is the latest addition to the Mida portfolio. Mida Call Analytics is a professional reporting system able to provide any insight a company needs to analyze its inbound call traffic. Moreover, the fact that this product produces reports that can be integrated with Power BI, combined with dedicated views on the database, allows companies to create their own custom reports, and then integrate insights with any business-related data.
The solution includes different modules, available as stand-alone products, and each of them comes with a set of template reports which collects the key data on contact center activities, enterprise accounting and compliance recording.
This call reporting and analytics tool is a must-have tool that helps businesses grow through actionable and integrated insights.
Are you thrilled to discover more about these products, or are you ready to discuss your project with us?
Click here to register for FREE to UC Summit 2022 and visit our virtual booth during the event to get the product documentation.
Contact us at marketing@midasolutions.com if you'd like to learn more.
Microsoft Teams updates - Fall 2021
Have you followed all the latest Microsoft Teams updates? If you feel you have missed something, don’t worry!
In this article, we have summarized the most important news, including the ones announced during the last Microsoft Ignite 2021, in November.
CHATS
- Delayed delivery - Soon you will be able to easily schedule messages to be sent when you prefer. This feature will be useful if you write a message and you want it to be delivered at a specific time.
- Enhanced research - Searching for information in Teams will be (finally- we were all looking forward to it!) faster. Thanks to new results filters and the possibility to toggle between tabs (messages, people, files), you will find what you need in a flash.
- Check people’s time zones - If you are used to collaborating with people based in a different time zone, being certain you are not messing up with meeting invites is not child’s play. The contact form will contain this information, helping you to optimize communication flow by decreasing response time.
- Chat with self - We know that chatting to yourself may sound strange, but it could be helpful. Soon in Teams, you can have this opportunity to have a secure private chat where you can save quick notes, drafts, ideas, and reminders.
WEBINARS AND MEETINGS
- Role assignation - When organizing a meeting, you will be able to assign people roles, such as presenters and co-organizers, and set who can change meeting options, create polls, and manage breakout rooms. This option can definitely improve the way you o manage online events in Teams.
- Hands-up order tracking - When presenting a webinar or during meetings, it isn’t so easy to understand in which order participants have raised their hand. To overcome this and avoid unpleasant situations, you can soon view the hands-up order to let attendees talk in the right sequence. Moderating Q&A sessions will be easier thanks to this option.
- Intelligent camera capture - Soon what you write on a physical whiteboard or documents can be captured by an intelligent camera and displayed on the screen as a high-quality image during meetings. This will be an interesting mix of the physical spaces and the virtual ones to increase engagement with, for example, hand-made graphics during a live event.
- New avatars experience - Hybrid work is a trend that is here to stay: people will continue to work from different places and for several reasons not everyone likes to turn on the camera during virtual meetings. Microsoft has introduced Mesh for MS Teams, bringing a new generation of 2D and 3D meeting experiences with personalized avatars and immersive spaces. This solution will use artificial intelligence to simulate facial expressions, eye contact, human gestures, achieving to maintain engagement and provide a sense of real presence during events. With Mesh for Microsoft Teams, in addition to this opportunity, you can create a new virtual space, resembling the physical ones, where avatars gather to collaborate and communicate feeling like they are in the same place in the physical world, like sharing documents and presentations on the same multimedia whiteboard in a meeting room .“We allow you to connect with presence and have a shared immersive experience directly in Teams”, said Satya Nadella, CEO at Microsoft.
- Virtual green room - You can soon create a virtual room in Teams, not accessible to the attendees, where event organizers and presenters can socialize and keep in touch before and during the event. This will improve collaboration and also the organization and management of live events in Teams.
- New attendees experience - While attendees wait for the event to start, it will be possible to set a welcome image and let them use the Q&A chat. Moderators can also review their questions before they are published and they will have the possibility to flag and pin the most relevant ones- together with their respective answers- in the Q&A space to make them more visible to attendees. This will avoid the repetition of similar questions during the event.
COLLABORATION
- Microsoft Loop - Working together will never be so easy: a new collaborative application will be available soon in Teams to help hybrid work models. This new feature will allow you to quickly create new workplaces with interactive widgets (e.g. tabs, notes, lists) and shared pages to collaborate simultaneously with other people, updating documents in real-time for all users across multiple applications. It will be easy to develop a joint project, with multiple apps data, and keep track of progress in a unique virtual space in Microsoft Teams.
- Teams Connect - This is going to become a new way to improve collaboration with people outside your company: you will have the capability to create a cross-company workplace to share files and channels with up to 50 teams, write documents, and chat also with people outside your organization.
What do you think about these new features? In the meantime stay updated by subscribing to our Newsletter here.
How to complete Microsoft Teams offer with enterprise telephony solution - webinar
Are you a service provider or a system integrator? What do you know about Direct Routing and contact center applications for Microsoft Teams? If you want to know more about this topic to help your customers choose the right UC solutions, you should save this date: 18th November 10 am CET. Patton Electronics will be hosting a webinar, in collaboration with us, where we will explain how enterprise telephony can be brought into Teams, thanks to Patton certified SBC combined with Mida products for Teams.
Mida and Patton partnership in a nutshell
In July 2021 we announced our partnership with Patton Electronics and the tested interoperability between our UC applications for Microsoft Teams and their SBCs certified for Direct Routing in Microsoft Teams (click here to read our article).
This partnership is a win-win collaboration which provides our joint customers with a complete and trusted offering for MS Teams, allowing them to move their communications in Teams without any thoughts, focusing only on the operational aspects. The testing phase Patton and Mida completed a few months ago, has swept away any technical complexity, making adoption and configuration much easier for IT Managers.
“The partnership with Patton is part of a wide-ranging project: we have invested a lot of resources over the last few years to integrate the Mida for MS Teams suite with a wide range of certified SBCs. This is because we think it is essential that customers can keep their trusted suppliers, if that is feasible,” said Marco Cortese, our President. “Patton is an international company and we are therefore proud to be able to offer their customers the possibility of using Mida contact centers, attendant consoles and recorder in MS Teams.”
Why you should attend this webinar
Patton and Mida during this one-hour webinar will explain why our UC solution for Microsoft Teams, together with their SBC offering, are the perfect mix for your corporate communications in Teams.
We will show participants how Patton certified SBC can securely enable the connection to the PSTN, how our professional voice applications for Teams (contact center, attendant console and recorder) integrate in the new telephony architecture, and the consequent advantages for both the final users and their Managers. We will show in detail what the tangible benefits of adopting Teams as a single hub are, and how to leverage the suite to manage the entire corporate communications.,
Don’t miss the opportunity to participate in the live Q&A, share your thoughts and clarify any doubts you may have. You will have the chance to address them directly to Marco Cortese, Sales Manager and President at Mida Solutions, and Gilberto di Pietro, Regional Sales Director at Patton Electronics.
Please note that the event is reserved for service providers and system integrators!
If you belong to one category or the other, then get on board registering here to book your virtual seat.
Meet us at “It’s all banking & insurance” - 2021
Next week we will attend “It’s all banking & insurance”, the event focused on technological solutions for the banking and insurance sectors. Despite you being a service provider, system integrator, or end-user, we will be happy to personally meet you in Milan in NH Milano Congress Centre. We will leverage this one-day event to present to visitors the UC solutions we built specifically to meet this markets’ requirements.
About the event
“It’s all banking & insurance” is the annual event that gathers technology vendors from all over the country, to present to Finance decision-makers and Managers the latest frontiers of technological and process innovation. It definitely represents a good opportunity to bring decision-makers, leaders, technology business’ managers together to develop new opportunities, inspire fintech innovation, and explore new markets and new solutions.
More than 500 participants, 100 speakers, 40 sponsors & exhibitors are expected. There will be 16 panel discussions on different fintech topics, including - just to name a few - IT service management, contact center, blockchain, and credit management.
Why should you attend?
Since Mida Solutions’ foundation, we have invested a lot on the research and development of our products. We have worked side by side with some of the main bank groups for years and over the years we refined our solutions for the Financial market to promptly meet their peculiar business needs. Our suite comprehends:
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- Attendant Console, a centralized customer service application, that can help your agents offer a better customer experience to banks’ customers.
- Compliance Recording, a complete recording solution able to safely record any type of call, both administrative and trading ones. It supports all recording methods: total, selective, on-demand, active and passive.
This UC suite makes finance business communications easier, providing your customers with quality service:
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- Intuitive - It’s simple to use and can be integrated with bank processes and the main CRM systems, to streamline agents’ workflows;
- Accessible from anywhere - It’s a web-based solution that allows to cut management costs and implement remote and hybrid work;
- Modular - It’s compatible with the main telephone vendor, such as Cisco and Microsoft Teams;
- Reliable - It’s adopted by more than 100 enterprises worldwide;
- Secure- It’s compliant with the latest privacy regulations (GDPR, MiFID II);
- Integrated into your business processes - It’s integrated with blockchain systems for a maximum level of data/processes security.
For further information about how Mida can support Finance enterprises with these dedicated solutions, please visit our website here.
3 reasons to adopt a contact center with CRM integration
The choice of which contact center platform to adopt is a complex task: there are many aspects to take into consideration, and they range from technical features, compatibility with pre-existing business applications and budget, just to list a few, but there’s one thing you want to be there for sure: the integration with your CRM. According to a recent Cisco survey, 2 out of 3 companies have already started to invest in this direction so let’s analyze together why this is among the most requested features of a contact center:
- Enhanced customer experience - The CRM integration helps to collect relevant customer information, that is useful to promptly handle any contact center incoming request: your agents can have access in real-time to all the details (e.g. personal and order data) they need while they are serving the call, with no need to put the caller on hold to search for them in other repositories or platforms. Seamless information connectivity helps agents to be more proactive in the conversation and able to grasp customers’ hidden needs, they can then share with other stakeholders for up-selling and cross-selling activities.. Nowadays the customer perception of the support service received by a company is crucial as it directly impacts the intent of purchase: 50% of people say that they would pay more for a product/service if the company they purchase from provides good support (Hubspot 2021 customer service report). Given the fact that acquiring a new customer is more expensive than maintaining a healthy and satisfactory relationship with an existing one, this customer service integration will play a key role in achieving this goal.
- Increased first call resolution rate - Agents' capability to access customers’ history is a real added value which can be conclusive in providing the solution the caller needs, during the first call. First call resolution rate is a critical customer service metric, and - despite the fact that it is not the one and only KPI to take into consideration when assessing the service performances- it’s among the key indicators of the service quality. The integration with the CRM helps agents increase these statistics, which is good also from their personal fulfillment point of view.
- Agents’ performances empowered with shared information - The two previous points are interconnected with the third one because the information collected from the CRM also helps your employees to empower their performances. Agents are more efficient as they can focus just on the current interaction without any extra interruptions. Each information about the customer is available in his/her CRM record, and it is shared within all departments.. This allows repetitive tasks, such as inserting personal or purchase data, to be reduced to the minimum or even zeroed: agents’ reporting tasks regard just new information shared by the caller during the call. Moreover, in some professional contact centers, callers are pre-filtered by an automated attendant, which helps the caller to speak with the best agent available based on the topic of the call.
To deepen this topic and discover the integration of our contact center with Dynamics and Salesforce, do not hesitate to contact us here. We will be happy to help you understand which is the right UC solution for your business!
6 tips to empower your agents' performances
No more doubts about the importance of keeping your agents motivated: the way your operators engage in their work, how they feel during the day, and how they organize their daily activities is often underestimated but these aspects definitely influence how they interact with your customers. Rather obviously, happy agents make your customer happier. Gaining more autonomy and feeling like they can really make the difference in helping customers, agents will be more productive and motivated. How can you help empower them?
Let’s analyze together 6 tips for enhancing your agents’ performances:
- Train your employees and create a team culture - According to recent research, 68% of customers claim that agent’s empathy is essential in customer service to make them more satisfied with the support they receive. For this reason, your agents must be solutions-focused and they must be trained to use positive language and to communicate clearly with empathy. Specific training courses could make them feel more comfortable during conversations with customers, pushing beyond their bounds of patience and practicing proactive and active listening. Preparing your agents to deal with peaks of stress and complex tasks can make the difference: from the business point of view, making your agents motivated and able to manage any issues customers may call for, will mean having them conscious of how valuable their role in the company is.
- Give operators the right UC tools - Agents must rely on a UC platform that helps them to perform at their best every day and to provide a top-quality service. They need to be supplied with appropriate, easy, and intuitive tools to properly welcome customers in a satisfactory way. Having customers’ historical records at hand, and having the opportunity to quickly leave notes or involve in the issue of other stakeholders within the company - through a CRM integration - can make the difference for them, possibly increasing the first call resolution rate. Advanced UC solutions also help decrease stress and customer frustration. This crucial aspect is detailed in the next bullet point.
- Ease the access to shared information - Listen to your agents to understand what they need to improve their performances. Being able to rely on shared information and multichannel resources will help agents be effective in their job. It is unthinkable that, during a conversation with a customer, your agent puts him/her on hold several times to search and collect all the information needed to have a wider picture of the issue he is in charge of solving. Agent workflow must be smart and all the information needed has to be available in a few clicks.
- Grant employees adequate beaks - Allow your agents to manage their availability manually both for after-call work activities and for short breaks, especially when they work from home (read more about remote customer service tips in this article). The software you use to manage incoming calls must give them the possibility not to receive calls during these absences. Missed calls negatively impact agents’ performance rate, so this can be a displeasing source of stress for them.
- Share with agents their performance KPIs and give them goals and periodical feedback - In order to improve or maintain a high customer service quality standard, your agents should be updated on how they are performing and briefed on how this data is interpreted: if operators can see their KPIs directly in a dashboard inside the platform they use to manage calls, they can understand by themselves how to enhance productivity, increase their efficiency and better handle customers’ requests. Motivate them with goals to increase their performance KPIs and give them your feedback about their job and customers’ feedback about the service they have provided.
- Purposes and rewards are better than penalizations - As said before, you might motivate your employees with goals and rewards but it’s crucial you don’t burden agents with the presence of a supervisor, who controls their activities and performance through a dedicated dashboard view in the UC platform they use.. Do not sadden them for their errors but give them the chance to admit them and give them a second chance... Remember that their opinions are as important as yours: listen to them and give them hints. Working in customer service can be sometimes monotonous but making agents feel like they are making the difference for the company and for your customers, will do good both to your staff’s determination and your business.
Keep in mind that empowering agents’ working activities and the tools they use impact directly on the customer experience, increasing contact center productivity and efficiency. These aspects must be coexistent because both are critical to your business’ success.
To go deeper into how a cloud contact center could help your agents check our product page Mida C3 page.
Microsoft Teams Updates - Summer 2021
Microsoft Teams never stops its improvement process to provide always the best user experience. Even in these summer months, Microsoft has announced several features focused on increasing participants’ engagement during meetings.
Have you lost some of them? Don’t worry, we got you covered! In this article we have summarized the most important ones, to help you take full advantage of Teams for your business meetings and webinars and improve your attendees’ experience:
- “Lock the meeting” option - This new feature allows organizers to block latecomers who want to join started meetings: a dedicated message informs them they are not allowed to join anymore. This solution is helpful to avoid speakers' distractions and at the moment is available only when using the Teams desktop app.
- Mobile layout optimization - A large gallery view is now available also for mobile devices. This helps you and your attendees engage better with your meetings from any place.
- Automatic meeting recordings - Now in the settings tabs of the Desktop or Mobile Teams App it is possible to activate the “record automatically” option to auto-record a meeting in Teams when the first participant of your organization joins it and then save the recorded file in your corporate OneDrive or SharePoint account.
- Live transcription in English-US and recording search - Thanks to this new feature, your participants can keep track of what was said during your meeting, especially in the event they join late the meeting. Thanks to this feature, users can search the recorded meeting in Teams by using Microsoft Search: through the same search tab in Teams they use to find other file types, they’ll be able to find recorded meetings in a moment. This search is based on the words included in the live transcription.
- Virtual laser pointer and slide transcription on PowerPoint Live - When slides are shared your speaker can point a virtual laser to indicate in the slides what he/she is talking about, making the meeting much more interesting. With PowerPoint Live there is also now a featured participant can access by clicking on the “more options' three dots, which allows them to better understand your speech by viewing the slides in one of the 19 available languages. These improvements state that Microsoft is struggling to always add new inclusive features.
- New message notification - Now, during meetings, it isn’t necessary to open the chat to view new messages: when a new message arrives a pop-up notification appears on the screen to inform you instantly.
- Lower all hands option - This option allows meeting organizers and presenters to lower all hands by clicking one button in the participant area. This is useful when all attendees’ questions are handled during meetings.
- Unmute for questions - During online meetings, often participants are muted by organizers and presenters but with this new feature, the attendee who raised his/her hand and wants to speak can unmute him/herself without waiting for the permission of the presenter.
- Spotlight up to 7 participants - Now it’s possible to pin more than one person simultaneously on desktop and mobile devices. This option, settable by organizers and presenters, allows to increase attendees’ attention and focus it on some specific users. Their profile picture or their video are pinned in a dedicated area on the screen.
- Attendance Dashboard - After a Teams meeting or a webinar, now a dashboard shows insights on the meeting: the number of people registered and participants and key information about them, such as name, duration of participation, join time, leave time, and role. This is useful for reporting and analyzing needs.
- Dynamics 365 Marketing connection - After an online meeting in Teams, the marketing team can set up follow-up customized emails for the attendees.
Are you ready to try these new Microsoft Teams features? To know also how you can fulfill customer expectations by handling professionally your UC in Teams, contact us here. We will be glad to know your project and expectations in moving Voice to Microsoft Teams!
No barriers for visually impaired and blind operators: the partnership with Vision Dept
The steady growth of customer service importance has placed more attention on user experience and how to meet call center employees' needs. To perform their job at best operators must be able to rely on professional tools, but what about visually impaired and blind agents? They need dedicated UC software with assistive technology to help them use computers.
Mida Solutions has relied on the collaboration with a best-of-breeds company as Vision Dept, to adapt its iconic product - Mida Attendant Console- to the special needs of visually impaired and blind operators.
Vision Dept is an Italian distributor of products and services for the visually impaired with the mission of helping them in their job thanks to innovative solutions and strong customer training and on-site assistance. In Italy, Vision Dept is known as the exclusive distributor for Italy for Freedom Scientific, the worldwide developer of software (e.g. Jaws) and hardware solutions for the visually impaired.
A re-engineerization of the product and the integration with some of the most common Magnifier and vocalization software on the market, allowed Mida and Vision Dept to meet customers’ demands in many projects over the years.
"Vision Dept has always worked with the aim of allowing blind and visually impaired people to be efficient. Our dream is to enable them to do the job that really satisfies them. The collaboration with Mida Solutions is really successful and, together, we managed to offer dozens of users a seamless working experience." says Andrea Amaglio, Technical and Sales Account at Vision Dept
For visually impaired operators the key elements we have included in the product are:
- compatibility with screen magnifiers as ZoomText, Magic, Cobra
- extreme customization- the console gives operators the possibility to choose fonts, colors, font size, contrasts, and shortcuts
- optimized layout, which contains just essential information
While for blind operators the solutions have:
- compatibility with the most used vocalization technologies, such as Jaws and NVDA. This helps them manage calls while using the same vocalizer they are familiar with. This improves their user experience with Mida Attendant Console while helping them handling calls
- optimization - the console layout is optimized for enlargers to increase performance and products' usability.
- keyboard shortcut to perform actions - the operator can use shortcuts to quickly search for the information he/she needs, as for example, the number of calls in the queue. The shortcuts can be fully customized by each operator, to meet his/her specific needs.
One of the most appreciated aspects of our partnership is the on-site support we provide to visually impaired and blind operators in the installation and training phase.
“Understanding the peculiarities of each visually impaired and blind operator and helping them in the first usage is essential to enhance them in their daily work activities. With our Attendant Console, their disability is not an obstacle and they feel integrated in their workplace” says Marco Cortese, Sales Manager and Owner of Mida Solutions.
To go deeper into this UC product check our dedicated page and do not hesitate to contact us to adopt it.