Mida and Ribbon: our joint proposition at Commsverse 2023
Commsverse 2023 is approaching: the biggest annual independent Microsoft Teams conference will take place on June 21-22, to show attendees how to face the current challenges of the Modern Workplace. Experts in the market will gather in Mercedes-Benz World, UK to discuss the main strategies and the future-forward technologies to improve the use of Microsoft Teams in a hybrid work scenario.
This year Mida Solutions is going to exhibit in the venue together with our longstanding partner Ribbon Communications to present our joint UC proposition that helps customers grow their business, migrate to cloud-native environments as well as achieve the desired IT, operational, and business benefits in doing so.
Why attend Commsverse 2023?
In 2022 Microsoft Teams had 270 million daily active users (+125 million in comparison to the previous year - Source: Statista). The number of its adoption almost doubles each year. It is widely adopted by companies worldwide as a professional tool to daily manage business communications for its simple user interface, huge range of third-party integration, and continuous updates that streamline communication and collaboration activities.
In this fast-changing scenario, it is a wise choice to stay always updated on what is new in this huge ecosystem and know how to leverage it at the best.
During this two-day event, you can do it: you will meet experts and technology vendors, address your questions to them, and choose from 70 technology-focused sessions.
Why stop by Mida and Ribbon’s stand?
Mida and Ribbon are among the gold sponsors of this event: you can meet us at booth 31 on the first floor to discover our joint proposition.
This year, we have chosen to exhibit at Commsverse 2023 together to better highlight the main pros of this joint offer. For years, we have aimed to empower companies to boost their Unified Communications and take advantage of them through always-updated solutions that run on Ribbon’s SBCs.
Our complete suite of advanced UC solutions - including Compliance Recorder for Microsoft Teams - is proposed in Ribbon’s price list to let companies purchase at the same time their first-class SBCs and our applications.
Through this approach moving from legacy systems to the Cloud is smoother. The migration is gradual and secure thanks to Ribbon's “Secure Cloud Migrations” (Teams, Zoom, Webex, Google, & more).
Companies can also rely on Ribbon “Analytics & UC Security” to get actionable insights to always monitor their network performance.
What to expect from us in this event?
During Commsverse, Mida will present the Compliance Recorder for Microsoft Teams which has been recently certified by Microsoft. It is an all-in-one and turnkey recording system that ensures a high-quality level of security to professionally store and retrieve business communications. Audio and video from different sources are collected within a unique professional application in compliance with the latest privacy regulations and internal requirements.
“Our Compliance Recorder for Microsoft Teams is one of our most popular products for the companies. It combines the highest level of security standards needed in environments such as finance and government and emergency call centers, with incredible flexibility in integrating into any ecosystem, perfect for enterprises of any scope”, says Attilio Licciardello, General Manager & Owner at Mida Solutions.
This recording system, available in three different business models, is the perfect system for a company migrating from legacy to Teams because it is adaptable to hybrid environments, registering both Teams to Teams calls, and legacy PBXs.
Not yet registered for the event?
Click here to get your ticket. Our Managers are waiting for you at booth #31 to show you the main pros of relying on this joint offer and answer your questions about it.
Would you like to reserve a time slot with us?
Book a meeting by using this link.
New release available now - Improved UX for your operators, also in Microsoft Teams!
We have some great news to share today: Mida Platform's latest release is now available in GA.
Which are the most electrifying new features available for our customers to empower their Unified Communication system and elevate their clients' expectations and satisfaction?
If you're a former acquaintance of Mida Solutions or you're an active customer you should know how much effort and energies we put into the research and development. You can blame the "occupational hazard" of our founders and engineers for it! :-)
All kidding aside, the constant dialogue with our existing customers worldwide and the cooperation with world-leading vendors highlighted some needs and integrations that we felt necessary to include in the next releases of our Mida Platform. For what concerns the release 3.0, just available in General Availability, the main features focus on deeper integration of our UC applications with Microsoft Teams and on the improvement of the User Experience both for the operators that daily work with our applications and their supervisors.
Let's now summarize in this post the improvements included in release 3.0 :
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Microsoft Teams compatibility
The new release improves the integration with Microsoft Teams. Following a smooth and simple process, you can migrate your entire UC systems to Microsoft Teams, making it your telephony system as well as your collaboration platform. Having an all-in-one solution will help your agents streamline their workflow saving time and being more efficient, and will offer you the advantage of having both internal and external communications managed from the same single hub. This new feature will impact positively also your customer service: thanks to the CRM integrations (Dynamics, Salesforce) your operators can provide your customers with satisfying assistance, saving instantly all the relevant information in the customers' records. Refer to this section to read more about Mida UC products integrated with Microsoft Teams and stay tuned because our team is working on other features related to this integration.
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A new user-friendly and simple GUI of Mida Recorder Playback Station
It is crucial that when a customer has to retrieve a recorded conversation, he/she can do it as quickly as possible. That's why in release 3.0 we've totally redesigned what we call the "Playback Station" of Mida Recorder. After a UX research on the users' habits, we have implemented a brand new User Interface: the new one facilitates the agent's work and through a Google-like search allows recordings to be found in seconds using all call tags/data fields associated with them. This useful tool allows also agents to listen back to recorded calls visualizing the waveform.
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Updated SIPREC Recording
In release 3.0 we have improved our SIPREC Recorder to provide users a better experience, allowing them to correctly record all the communications transiting through the SBC. Our recorder connects to a SIPREC-enabled port and receives the calls to be recorded through a dialogue based on the SIP protocol. This recording method is becoming very popular because of the increasing adoption of SBCs devices, especially in the deployment of Microsoft Teams Direct Routing.
The interoperability of Mida UC applications with most of the SBCs certified for Direct Routing in Microsoft Teams ensures you a smooth implementation in your existing infrastructure, whether it comprehends a Ribbon, AudioCodes, Oracle, Cisco, Avaya, Nokia, Italtel SBC.
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Recorded calls stored in Azure
With release 3.0, you can decide to store your recorded calls directly in Azure Cloud, this gives the flexibility to back up them directly on the Azure shared folder server without having a NAS.
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Maximum security level for your UC
The new release 3.0 runs on a new kernel to ensure you a maximum level of UC security.
Do you want to go much further in the new release 3.0? We will be happy to explain to you in detail the advantages you can have from these new implementations, contact us here to book your free slot with one of our experts!
Mida Recorder for Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise technologies
Mida is proud to announce another great milestone that guarantees product high quality and reliability.
Concurrently with our latest interview published by UC Today, we announced the certification of our Recorder for Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise. Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise has been a technology partner for many years and now we can publicly declare that Mida Recorder is officially certified for Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise PBXs. This milestone is proof of the maximum interoperability between our solution and ALE's.
Mida Recorder and ALE's PBXs have already been successfully used in the past, in several transportation projects in the APAC area.
This new certification is a value-added characteristic for every company leveraging ALE's PBXs and Mida Recorder to increase and improve its efficiency and compliance with regulations on registration. The smooth and certified integration between the two systems states the perfect interoperation and reliability of the combined solution, suitable also for the most critical environments, like transportation.
"Its flexible architecture ensures full scalability; the modular approach allows to deploy centralized or distributed systems depending on resiliency and redundancy requirements. Leveraging on virtualization, the overall software is independent of the underneath technology that can be based on professional hardware or standard enterprise servers" declares the certification, confirming the solution can be applied either in the Enterprise, Transportation, Critical Communication, and Financial market.
Refer to the official certification document by Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise to know more about this certification, and do not hesitate to contact us for any questions.
Threats and advantages of moving a contact center service to Microsoft Teams
More than 115 million people use daily Microsoft Teams as a collaboration and communication platform. It is a reliable solution which has proven to be live up with expectations, also in the enterprise environment.
This has led to an increasing interest of companies towards Teams and now CIOs and IT Managers are focusing on the opportunity to use Microsoft Teams as a platform to replace legacy phone systems and associated applications, providing remote working employees with a complete communication platform.
Should customers expect feature parity with a legacy PBX and contact center solution?
That’s now a trending topic in the business environment and of course, the answer to this question cannot be just yes or no. In this article, we will try to highlight threats and advantages of moving a contact center service to Microsoft Teams.
As per Microsoft statements on several occasions - Microsoft is leaving to third-party apps the advanced call management features required by a contact center. Natively Teams includes some basic call treatment functions like auto attendance, call queues, business hours, very basic dashboards, and analytics, which can be enough to fulfill the needs of SMBs or companies where incoming calls are managed just by a bunch of operators, using a few lines.
“For some companies, Microsoft Teams’ cloud voice capabilities, including auto-attendant and call queues, provide the features and configuration to meet their needs. For others who desire integrated solutions with business tools and workflows to drive the customer journey, Microsoft Teams also integrates with some of the industry’s leading Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) solution providers” writes Microsoft in one the official integration page. In the latter case, the only type of contact center available to date is what Microsoft itself called a “connected contact center”.
Some of the main vendors on the market are developing connected contact center applications using Direct Routing to connect to the PSTN, and that’s for certain an advantage as this leaves customers the freedom to decide their preferred provider among the ones which offer Microsoft Teams certified SBCs.
Among the advantages, in terms of advanced added features this kind of contact center may add to Teams there is a series of not insignificant benefits, both from the operators’ and user experience point of view.
- Collaboration and customer service are hosted in the same Hub that manages the entire communications of the company – this maximizes efficiency and time loss. Some vendors – including Mida Solution- offer an integrated attendant console Microsoft Teams App, operators can use directly from the Teams window.
- Third-party applications can empower customer service with sophisticated dispatching algorithms, like basic round-robin, multiple queue skill-based routing. Calls coming from different sources like PSTN, Teams, Skype for Business, and others can be merged into common service queues.
- The customer journey and customer experience can be improved, as third-party apps can include more flexible Interactive voice responses that enterprises can customize to continue supporting their customers efficiently.
- The presence of the SBC allows integrating also other complementary UC applications, like for example a recording solution.
- Some connected contact center applications can integrate their data with Business Intelligence platforms. That is an enormous advantage for enterprises, as this allows them to generate analytics about their UC system, that can be available in different formats and can become part of the Global data asset of a company.
On the other hand, enterprises transferring Unified Communications from a legacy PBX to Teams, may pay attention to a few of aspects related to the interaction of the existing UC solution with other business applications and appliances. Also, not all connected contact center solutions guarantee a non-intrusive treatment of the conversations: this can reflect delays and degradation in the media path, to the detriment of the conversation quality and consequently of the customer experience.
If you want to find out more about this topic, you can watch this interview to Mauro Franchin, Mida Solutions CTO.
How Mida Solutions can help you
Get in touch with us directly to discover the advantages your customer service can have thanks to Mida C3 Cloud Contact Center for Microsoft Teams. We will be happy to answer your doubts and to help you define a smooth migration process to Microsoft Teams.
Microsoft Teams latest updates
With over 27 million meetings per month and more than 115 million daily active users, the increase in Microsoft Teams' adoption continues both in the business environment and in education.
Here are some of the latest Microsoft Teams updates, which could be helpful to improve your business communications and workflows:
COLLABORATIVE EXPERIENCE
- APPROVALS will simplify requests approval. This function will allow creating, managing, and sharing approvals directly from the hub for teamwork, speeding up approval flows, while keeping them always under control. Watch the official Microsoft video to know more.
- TASKS: organizations will be able to create tasks centrally at the corporate level and publish them to different locations, sharing them with managers as well with frontline teams. Frontline users can view and manage both individual tasks and team tasks and they can prioritize them, keeping under control all their to-do list directly in Teams.
- ADD A SHARED CALENDAR TO A TEAMS CHANNEL: Members of a specific channel will be able to add a shared calendar in the channel. When a new meeting is scheduled, a new post notifies people in that same channel, and they can easily add the event also to their personal calendar. In this way, everyone in the channel will have visibility on upcoming events.
CHAT AND CALL EXPERIENCE
- DIAL-IN NUMBER: now you can join Microsoft Teams meetings for free also with a global dial-in number from a mobile device.
- NEW CERTIFIED SBC: the list of SBC certified for the Direct Routing for Microsoft Teams continues to grow. New SBC vendors have successfully completed the Session Border Controller certification process. Included in this list, there are some world-famous companies like Ribbon Communications, Audiocodes, Oracle, Avaya.
- CORTANA VOICE ASSISTANCE: soon you will be able to schedule a meeting, add participants to an invitation and compose messages, using your voice.
- MULTI-WINDOWS VIEW: jumping from one conversation to another will be much easier, as this feature allows you to pop-out different chats in separate windows. The same new option is available for meetings and calling experience, helping to optimize your workflow.
Microsoft announced also the integration with SAP applications, available from mid-2021. This will allow the use of collaboration tools with no need to go from one platform to the other, increasing business productivity. Users will be able to contact directly the partner with real-time communication.
These are some of the latest official updates, but if you like to deepen them all, please refer to Microsoft's official blog.
2021 Customer Service trends
The new year has started and we wanted to share the predictions for 2021 customer service trends.
Covid-19 Pandemic is still part of our lives and even if a vaccination plan is on the horizon, this scenario will generate a huge impact on business and on customer needs for a while longer than the end of the Pandemic. Maybe it caused a breaking point from the past that would affect customer expectations forever.
Using online customer service or online chat to obtain assistance has become the new habit and people tend to be less patient than before expecting their questions to be answered immediately or in a few minutes at most. Keeping that in mind, companies must rethink their business model, strategies, and maybe their infrastructure to increase customer satisfaction and customer experience, favoring this new end-customer behavior. How could they do that?
Here there are three customer service trends for 2021, you don’t want to miss.
1. Customer service will remain from home
Thanks to the experience accrued in the past months -when companies had to unexpectedly organize their employees working remotely during the lockdown or in a hybrid-remote scenario- this year employees will continue working from home.
In the UK, during the Pandemic, 77% of customer service companies had more than 50% of their employees working from home and this scenario is still in place this year. Remote work could be in part optional and in part compulsory and companies will have both remote managers and agents.
It is anticipated that companies will implement tools to track and control the employee’s activities, but also services able to reduce the stress caused by working isolated. Indeed, helping employees taking care of their mental health when working remotely will be a challenge in 2021 that can determine whether remote workers are happy and productive or not.
The selection of the best collaboration platform will help both the company to keep statistics high and the staff to reduce mental stress. This aspect, together with the employees’ training, will help fulfill customers’ high expectations.
2. New remote support technologies and optimized tech stack
As homes have been transformed into office spaces, companies will invest more resources in changing the technologies used to provide remote support to customers (that is, how employees working remotely get in touch with customers from home).
Among these technologies of course there will be cloud VOIP systems, video consultation, live chat software,e and so on. Remote technology will be used in monitoring contact center activities as well, as during this current WFH-year managers will be determined to analyze the performances of agents and services.
A collateral effect of WFH is the so-called point pollution problem, that is data and information coming from different sources. This was a pain point for enterprises in 2020, so this year convergence and cohesion of data is an objective to be achieved through an optimized tech stack. Both remote and office workers' data needs to be better shareable (while remaining protected) between the different technologies used.
3. Web-based customer experience
Automation and artificial intelligence will be used massively to manage first-level customer service requests, to filter just the ones that require a skilled agent to be solved. 39% of UK companies is to use these technologies and 89% of customer services companies said that covid-19 is the reason why their shift to AI and automation has been accelerated in the latest months. Chatbots will be more used in customer service, solving customers’ most common questions immediately, decreasing the volume of requests which need to be handled by an agent.
As in the post-pandemic era 59% of people give more importance to the customer experience, rating it as the main reason to follow or buy from a brand, companies will have to optimize their service to increase brand awareness and customer satisfaction.
Do you agree with these previsions, or do you see different scenarios for customer service in 2021? Share your opinion here.
What is new in Microsoft Teams? - December 2020
The number of Microsoft Teams daily active users continues to increase: in April 2020 they were 75 million and now they are 115 million.
What users seem to appreciate the most is not only that from Teams they can manage calls, chats, and meetings, but they can leverage on it as a collaborative platform taking advantage of many tools and integrated apps.
Stay updated on Microsoft Teams’ news is fundamental to take the most out of this platform and increase meeting engagement and productivity.
So let’s summarize the main news announced for December 2020!
POLLS IN MEETINGS
Engaging meetings participants will be easier with new polls in Teams. You can create them in advance or launch them during your calls and a pop-up will appear in participants Teams windows.
Create a poll has never been so simple, as you do not need any third-parties app. You just need to install and configure the new extension available in Teams with an administrative profile. Alternatively, you can also create polls with the Forms app.
TEAMS PHONES
Your calling and meeting experience in Teams from your mobile device will be improved thanks to this update. It may happen that while you’re out of office, you have meetings planned on your Teams’ calendar... Microsoft has introduced a dedicated button that allows you to join the meeting or the call directly from your Teams Phones calendar.
Moreover, if the call has been created in a Teams channel with the Meet Now option, anyone in that channel will be able to join, even if he/she has not been invited before.
Other features available from the mobile:
- together mode view
- 3x3 layout
- background blur
- when in mute, you can select the button request to speak as you have using the computer.
- ask Cortana, Microsoft's digital assistant, to join meetings and present them
- dictate messages from mobile phones.
Starting from 2021 it will be also possible to transfer a call from PC to mobile decreasing the data usage during meetings. This will be amazing especially when working remotely!
NOISE SUPPRESSION
Whether you work in the office or from home, background noise during calls or meetings is always annoying and distracts participants. Microsoft has implemented real-time AI-based noise suppression which automatically removes unwelcome background noises. People who have already tested it said it works like a charm!
BETTER LEVERAGING SCREEN AND CALLS
Thanks to this last Teams update you can choose from many new different together mode scenes to create a new experience with all the participants. Now you can see participants in one screen and the presentation slides on a second screen because Teams Rooms now support dual screens.
Moreover, if needed in some particular environment, for example, healthcare, from the administration profile you can decide to automatically answer calls without clicking any button.
CALL MERGE AND SPAM IDENTIFICATION
While you're on a call with someone (or a group call), you may need to ask someone else a question. Now you can make a call while you are still in another one, and merge them together.
Another important feature will be spam identification: Teams will identify potential spam calls to avoid annoying interruption; while Teams will digitally attest your outgoing calls to prevent them from being rejected by external recipients.
PIN POSTS
Sometimes you need to pin a message that is important to you, as you need to keep it visible and highlighted... This is now possible in Teams and you can also put that pinned message in one channel, in the information panel to be visible for all members.
SET PRESENCE STATUS
With this new update, you can manage your presence status, setting it also for specific dates and times in the future.
CARPLAY SUPPORT
Soon you will be able to connect your Microsoft Teams to your CarPlay to easily answer calls and join meetings when you are driving, also with the assistance of Siri.
More features will soon be available and in the early 2021, we’ll have a thrilling piece of news to share: our contact center will be certified for Microsoft Teams! Stay tuned!!
Italian Public Administrations choose Mida Attendant Console
We are happy to announce that starting from January 2021 Mida Attendant Console will be available in the Italian Public Administrations telephony services price list. Mida is included in the CT8 tender and our attendant console will be provided to all Public Administrations buying a Sangoma PBX for their telephony system and requiring an Operator Console solution.
Recently Consip S.p.A. - the joint-stock company wholly owned by the Italian Ministry of Economy and Finance, which manages the procurement processes for all Italian Public Administrations- has adjudicated the CT8 contest for the supply, implementation, and maintenance of private telephone systems and related products and services. The aim of this initiative, now in its eighth edition, is to encourage the use of IT tools in the Public Administration promoting innovation and simplification.
To us it’s a great honor as it represents a milestone in our collaboration with Sangoma: we have partnered for many years now and Mida have designed an attendant console able to fully cooperate with Sangoma PBXs.
The solution is reliable and its intuitive UI makes it ideal even for novice computer users. Public servants can easily and efficiently manage all incoming calls, regardless of whether they’re working from the office or from home, thanks to the web-based interface that requires just a computer and a connection to work. It has been designed and has been also certified for visually impaired and blind operators as it can be integrated with the main screen magnifiers and braille display supports. This is a very important integration, as visually impaired and blind people are often employed in the public sector, especially as call center/customer service operators.
Being on the Italian Public Administrations price list is the confirmation that our products’ quality and reliability meets the requirements of complex environments such as the ones of local and regional authorities, hospitals and health authorities, universities.
Stay tuned to know other details and read our case studies.
A new contact center age
Contact Center solutions are now changing and this is a topic of growing interest in 2020. Companies’ challenge is to increase customer satisfaction with a 100% efficient service: as we don’t know exactly when face-to-face interactions will be possible again, now more than ever their service will be rated 5 stars only if they’ll be able to reduce long and boring waiting times. Providing a satisfactory experience thanks to digital technologies will help your customer care service to be more efficient and productive.
Fortunately, most companies know well the importance of customer services and their direct impact on the entire business (for example awareness, gains, and word of mouth) so they are now focusing their attention on how to improve customer experience through these types of services.
Especially during this particular moment when most people work from home, the landscape has changed: everyone needs constantly to be connected in order to interact with people, so their patience is not that much, they want to solve a problem quickly and often immediately, their expectations are high.
“Companies are taking the contact centre more seriously. It’s the last thing between your business and a lost opportunity. In a world where customers want more, companies are delivering easier, more optimized experiences.” - says Zac Taylor, Director of strategic communications for contact center solutions at Cisco.
Automation and digital innovation can help agents perform their job at best:
- The technology support can ease processes and the retrieval of information needed from behind the scenes, while the agent’s speaking on the phone, leaving more space for a genuine, empathetic conversation with the customer.
- Intelligent virtual agents can answer to some questions directly, providing an immediate response.
Companies producing Contact center softwares focus their attention on offering products able to solve final customer’s problems efficiently in less time and the first-time around. No customer should be stressed or be forced to call a second time for the same problem.
A professional software working behind the scenes of a contact center can make the difference and boost both agents’ performances and customers’ satisfaction. An inadequate software can have a bad impact on both because it can be your last chance to recover an unhappy customer.
For example, the contact center integration with the company CRM platform is an incredibly powerful weapon that allows operators to keep a close eye on your customers’ cards during the calls and to take notes and transfer them to other departments or specific persons, according to your preferences.
Business Intelligence is another technology that can support your company in the analysis of your contact center performances: collecting and analyzing customer data is important for you to monitor and evaluate the customer experience and the customer service and bring to light possible critical issues.
Mida Solutions R&D Department is now working on these new technologies - and others will be considered in the next months- in order to provide its customers with cutting-edge technologies able to maximize customer service and turn it into a positive experience.
Stay tuned!
Mida Solutions, Nethive, and Offsquare: together for the internationalization
Mida Solutions, Nethive, and Offsquare have won the program POR FESR 2014-2020 for internationalization activities.
POR (Italian acronym for Regional Operational Programme) is the instrument through which the Veneto Region, thanks to the approximately 600 million euros made available by the European Union, the State and the Region itself, will develop from 2014 to 2020 (due to Covid-19 the closing has been rescheduled for 2022) a social and economic growth plan that will affect research and innovation, the digital agenda, industrial, energy and environmental protection policies.
It is a great honor for us to be part of this European program and to collaborate with these two IT companies based in our own region. With them, we created a temporary joint venture with the common mission to internationalize our business thanks to global events, technical certifications, and professional consultations. For the entire duration of the program - and surely beyond- we’ll share with each other personal achievements and acquired skills.
Nethive S.r.l. is a company based in Limena (Padua) that, since 2013, offers services and consultations in the following areas: security, networking, and software development. Leveraging on the POR FESR program the company will open up to international markets thanks to global events and tradeshows and reinforce its brand awareness thanks to strategic marketing activities and collaborations with international partners. To improve its competitiveness they will hire an International Senior Program Manager who will coordinate the marketing projects in the international markets.
Offsquare S.r.l. is a web agency based in Bassano del Grappa (Vicenza) that deals with digital marketing and online communications activities, developing innovative services and solutions such as websites and e-commerce creation, social media management, content marketing.., web design, web development, and digital strategies. The main objective the company wants to achieve thanks to POR FESR is to reach new markets (Germany, France, Spain) leveraging on its skills to support Italian companies selling abroad through digital channels.
Mida is the leading company of the temporary joint venture and we’re currently planning our participation in 2020 and 2021 in international events and exhibitions in the USA, UAE, France, and Germany and we have already worked with an Israeli marketing agency on some international promotion activities. We are already working also with a company specialized in UI/UX design to adapt the interfaces of our products for an international audience. In 2021 we plan to obtain also some certifications that will improve our products’ perception in the global market.
With these activities, we want to improve the perception of our company and products on a global scale, and we want to reach a larger number of foreign companies interested in Unified Communication solutions, leveraging on the value of our highly-skilled technical team...
Please follow our News section, as we will share periodically reports on the working progress and achievements.