Excelien partner with Zoom

Zoom was one of the most common words used in 2019. For many some older generations maybe the new MSN, the uptake wasn’t just businesses allowing users to continue WFH but consumers having access and meeting friends and family online.

Excelien is excited to have Zoom now part of our portfolio of vendors. We see Zoom as an easy-to-use, dependable and innovative platform for video-first unified communication, which also delivers phone, meetings, webinars and team chat.

The advisory services work with several vendors and continually analyse these but, Zoom is architected different, it’s the only platform which was built with video as its root foundation, this at its core is why customers like Walmart, Uber and Hubspot rely on this the reliability and scalability, not only that; Zoom also have a customer footprint in over 94% of countries around the world!

The common association with Zoom is video, which is true, but the video-first communications platform also offers:

Zoom has, and will continue to mould the way enterprise organisations globally communicate and connect. Zoom comprises all the tools you need into one simple platform – from 1:1 meetings to meeting rooms to large broadcasted webinars. It’s a seamless experience on desktop, mobile and conference rooms. With Zoom, companies have seen an 85% increase in video usage and VOIP six times more than traditional telephony – so people join fast and are more productive, and companies save money.

If you’ve come straight to this page, you may have missed how we work, Excelien has partnered with Zoom on an advisory partnership; this means, you have free access to our pre-sales team, consultants and 0% margin pricing.

  • What’s the most important priority to you with video collaboration?
  • What would you like to accomplish with Zoom, drive sales, expand the market or more?
  • What features are you currently using in your existing solution? What are some specific features you require but do not now have?
  • What do you do for IM and Presence today?
  • What are you using for voice today – on-prem vs PBX?

Excelien have a range of experts experienced in delivering Zoom, speak to one of the consultants and understand how we can help you in your journey.

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IT Procurement, Why choose Excelien?

IT Procurement consists of 4 pillars:
People, Process, Technology and Supply Chain.

At Excelien, we strive to meet and deliver on all these.

We have an experienced and more importantly, an enthusiastic team to support our clients.
We put in SLA’s into our procurement agreements to ensure our service is measurable.
We invest in technology to simplify the process, whether that’s a single system to track over 260 couriers or online portal.
We continue to grow our supply chain with a vast network of distributors and suppliers worldwide, meaning we can source stock quickly, be competitive in price and more importantly deliver.
Speak to one of our team, and see how we can help your IT procurement strategy at hello@excelien.com

 

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The evolution of the call centre to contact centre

The time is now to change the contact centre vision.

When you think call centre, it’s usually not good – PPI, Have you had a crash recently that wasn’t your fault – this still happens but think contact centres, what comes to mind? If it’s the BBC programme, then we need to change your mindset. The industry is one of the largest with a market size of £3bn and employing around 1.3 million in the UK – it’s a big deal.  

The journey from call centre to contact centre

We want to say historically (but it is still the case today) that the vision of a typical call centre is a floor lined with agents wall to wall, floor to floor taking calls all day – these days are gone, and technology along with the world has moved on thanks to the ‘contact centre’. Similar to how mobiles have moved from briefcases to smartphones, we now see the contact centre as more than a machine that churns out sales and services, to becoming an integral and intelligent asset with a broader range of business roles.

The output has moved from being a simple sales function to, enabling better and personalised customer experience, more accessible and in-depth reporting and a catalogue of integrations. These are the critical components of omnichannel customer service for any organisation, allowing customers to contact a company, through whatever method is best suited to them.

Digital transformation has accelerated with technology; the contact centre is no different, it’s been enhanced with features from skill-based routing, social media integrations, CRM integrations, automated sales training, AI predicting trends and workforce management. Contact centres have moved on from data-driven to analytic driven processes, delivering an unparallel service through a more personalised customer experience.

Along came COVID

COVID changed all industries, especially contact centres, where the environment was in large open plan offices, employees working with close proximities of each other, meant that these were high-risk areas, vulnerable to COVID. In the UK, we remember when the lockdown was enforced on BBC in the evening, and overnight, offices were forced to shut down, and contact centres were in the same position.

Many of these weren’t ready, working from home wasn’t viable, PCI compliance wasn’t possible, reporting wasn’t possible, softphone wasn’t possible, system access wasn’t possible and so on…some just weren’t ready.

Disaster recovery is a contingency plan, and strategies are usually in place to ensure, businesses can continue as usual should the office not. Contact Centres struggled. With a massive surge in demand from internet shopping, economic changes and business changes, the cracks began to show and were clearly visible. Homebase should have had a boom in business turned off contact centre services, retailers not being able to take payments because of PCI not being available to WFH staff, Virgin Media contacting their 5.5 million broadband customers to ask them not to call.

Excelien knows it’s time to change and adapt, and continually adapt with the best contact centre technology to enhance the services you deliver, the outcomes your business produces and how you help your customers. With digital transformation across all industries and the ability to have what you want almost in an instant, customers now expect a certain level of service, so whether you’re a small retailer, a large bank, insurance firm – customer experience is a priority.

Customers build the company and are more critical than ever in the climate we’re in, contact centres need be a significant component of an enhanced customer service offering for your company, empowering consumers to communicate with you in a meaningful way, in the channel of their preference.

Tomorrow is the future, but the time is now. 

It’s still not clear waters yet.

We’re not out of the woods yet.

COVID forced a change predicted years from now in buying and selling behaviour. Consumers are moving online as their primary way of shopping and how a business manages its customers is more important than ever. We don’t particularly like to focus on doom and gloom. Still, the conversation of COVID and Christmas is already being debating, and with the various systems being thrown around whether its Tier, Circuit Breaker or regional/national lockdown, the ability to sail this one calmly is a priority.

COVID has forced a change in buying and selling behaviour. Consumers are buying more online and with the most crucial shopping season for retailers on the horizon, how businesses deal with their customers is more important than ever. The “Will COVID steal Christmas” debate is already on. Throw in the potential of another national lockdown and the ability to weather the storm and come out the other side really is blown wide open.

Fail to prepare, prepare to fail

The time came, and it will continually come in which businesses need to adapt and embrace all that’s on offer from contact centres. Not solely from a disaster recovery perspective but where they can supercharge customer experience, gain more insights into buying trends and potentially save money.

Excelien is your advisory partner for contact centre technology industrywide, if you would like to speak to one of our experienced experts to understand the market, please talk to us today.

Excelien is your consultative partner for contact centre technology, if you would like to know more, please speak to one of our experts today. 

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Biggest Cyber Attacks of 2020

Hackers a difficult people to understand, they don’t discriminate, they’re looking for any open door, every opportunity, to steal data, make money whether small or large amounts, cause disruption in business and ultimately chaos!

Enterprise businesses to SMB can fall prey, and at Excelien, we work our clients to ensure they’re aware of the latest technology, with access to our security consultants and security assessments. We’ve all seen headlines with companies who you would expect to have a concrete fortress become victims. The pandemic seems to have accelerated some of the most significant breaches that have taken place in 2020. Here’s a reminder of some of the headline-grabbing attacks, and the stark reality and severity of these cyber attacks.

WHO – World Health Organisation

WHO has been giving guidance through this pandemic but in the midst of was part of a massive data leak of 25,000 email addresses and passwords unlawfully accessed. It was common belief to be part of a broader attempt to disrupt the battle against Coronavirus, with organisations such WHO, National Institutes of Health (NIH), and Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Gates Foundation and more being hit by these team of elite hackers.

WHO confirmed a phishing campaign was used and targeted at its employees. WHO’s CIO, Bernardo Mariano stated, “Ensuring the security of health information for the Member States and privacy of users interacting with us a priority for WHO at all times, but also particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic, We are grateful for the alerts we receive from the Member States and the private sector. We are all in this fight together.” It is still not clear if this cyber attack had any significant effect. According to WHO, the leaked information did impact an older extranet system, causing them to migrate to a more secure infrastructure.

Twitter

The Twitter breach was probably the most visible and famous attacks to date, with celebrities from all walks of life such reality star Kim Kardashian to tech guru Elon Musk to the ex-president Barack Obama. Though this was an attack which took place over a few hours, the exposure was huge.

The attack targeted a small group of Twitter’s employees through a phone spearphishing campaign, enabling hackers to gain access to Twitter’s internal support system, which then allowed them to target further employees. According to Twitter, using the acquired credentials, around 130 Twitter accounts had been hit, Tweeting from 45 of those, accessing the direct messaging feature of 36 and downloading the Twitter Data of 7. Twitter Support released a statement explaining, “This attack relied on a significant and concerted attempt to mislead certain employees and exploit human vulnerabilities to gain access to our internal systems.” The actual outcome of this elaborate hack isn’t clear, the incident has led to significant distrust with Twitter and its security protocols, and will most likely live on as one of the largest in cybersecurity disasters to a social media platform.

Zoom

The use of Zoom has skyrocketed through the pandemic to enable the working from home to be the new normal. Zoom overnight became the big name, the go-to for a virtual meeting – the cybercriminals saw this, and soon became a target.

Cyberattacks have relentlessly targeted Zoom in the past and in April 2020 did in fact experience a data breach. Over 500,000 Zoom passwords were stolen and available for sale or even being given away for free across dark web forums. The attack impacted everything from personal accounts to financial and educational organisations. Victims’ login credentials, private meeting URLs and HostKeys were released. It’s believed that attackers used old stolen credentials, some from 2013. They used a credential stuffing attack which used multiple bots to avoid the same IP address for numerous Zoom accounts and to prevent detection as a denial of service (DoS) attack.

Zoom responded, “We have already hired multiple intelligence firms to find these password dumps, and the tools used to create them, As well as a firm that has shut down thousands of websites attempting to trick users into downloading malware or giving up their credentials.” Zoom will continue to examine the breach, are shutting accounts which they have found to be compromised, prompting users to change their passwords to something more secure, and investing into more technology solutions to bolster Zooms efforts.

Marriott International

A very public and large-scale security breach at the beginning of this year with a leading hotel group, Marriott, led to the data of more than 5.2 million guests data having their data compromised. Marriott believes hackers might have gained login credentials of two employees either by credential stuffing or phishing and subsequently able to gain access to information for customers part of the Marriott loyalty scheme.

Even though Marriott disclosed the security breach on March 31, 2020, it’s concluded that the data had been taken around a month before and included personal information including names, birthdates, and telephone numbers, travel news, and loyalty program information. It isn’t the first time that the hotel has announced a significant data breach – in 2018, they encountered a cyber-attack leaving 500 million guests affected.

MGM Resorts

Although it started in 2019, the data breach experienced by major hospitality group, MGM Resorts, continues in 2020. And it may be much larger than initially reported – now understood to have affected more than 142 million hotel guests (14 times the 10.6 million reported in February).

The attack came to light in an ad published on the dark web marketplace offering to sell the data of 142,479,937 MGM guests for just over $2,900. According to the seller, MGM Grand Hotels data as part of this. Hijacked information is assumed to include name, phone numbers, home address, email addresses, and birth date of guests, including those of Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, Justin Bieber and prominent government officials.

An MGM Resort spokesperson confirmed that impacted guests were notified about the data breach and added: “We are confident that no financial, payment card or password data was involved in this matter.” Although this is considered “phone book” information, a fear is that the personal data will continue to be sold, which opens up opportunities for spearphishing campaigns.

Garmin

Garmin known for its smartwatch and wearables had shut several of its services in July to deal with a ransomware attack, that encrypted its internal network and some production systems.

The company is still planning to have some severe downtime following this attack as they prepare for a multi-day maintenance window to deal with the aftermath, this includes the website going offline, Garmin Connect and Garmin Aviation services, and even manufacturing lines within Asia.

Garmin said the outage had also impacted its call centres, putting the company in a situation of being unable to answer emails, calls, and online chats.

The attack didn’t pass quietly and caused headaches for the company’s customers, who rely on the Garmin Connect service to sync data about bike rides and runs to Garmin’s servers, all of which also went down on.

It wasn’t just consumer wearables effected, flyGarmin was also down which supports the company’s line of aviation equipment. Another blow, following this outage, updates weren’t available for this software an FAA requirement to run an up-to-date version of this database.

The extent of the breach continues unknown to third-party observers. Besides consumer sportswear, wearables and smartwatches, Garmin also delivers mapping, tracking solutions and equipment for the maritime and automotive industry. The actual impact of the ransomware attack on these services remains unclear.

What Can We Learn from These Cyber Attacks?


Businesses need to be diligent. Cybersecurity always needs to be in front of mind and system as well as routinely assessed. Companies from small to the enterprise can easily fall prey of phishing schemes, ransomware, DDoS, malware, and other attacks leading to data breaches.

Excelien works with you to take the necessary precautions is the best chance they have at staying secure. Along with detection and response tools, authentication protocols, and ongoing employee security awareness training can make the most significant difference.

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Excelien and RingCentral present: Enhancing the customer and employee communication and collaboration experience

Excelien has a long-established relationship working with RingCentral delivering UCaaS and CCaaS solutions within the finance industry. We’ve helped organisations consolidate global telecom estates to a single platform, revolutionise their contact centre and boost productivity and efficiency with RingCentral.

We look at how Fintech startups, as well as established banking, accounting, and insurance companies, rely on RingCentral to help them with the challenge of balancing cost, regulations, and confidentiality in a fast, ever-changing digital world. Excelien with RingCentral discusses how an all-in-one secure communications and collaboration platform gives organisations the opportunity to deliver a top-tier personalised experience while making significant budget savings.

Join this webinar on July 22nd at 10 am (BST) to discover why RingCentral is a secure, compliant, and unified communications solution built for financial services.

What will be covered?

– Drive user productivity and efficiency gains
– Consolidation of business communications into one single app
– Customise with market-leading integrations with your existing technologies
– Increase customer engagement and satisfaction
– Deliver competitive, quality customer service
– The highest level of security for financial data

Sign up here!

 

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Excelien supporting IT procurement across EMEA and APAC

Companies are continually increasing their international presence into further markets, whether it’s to lure new customers, looking to expand product expertise, or to support growth in emerging markets. Following the correct approach is vital, so without the right method, you could be left open to unpredictable or unmanagable costs, loss in productivity, or even jeopardise your market share.

Ensuring the right technology supports you is one piece to the puzzle, and making sure you have an effective procurement strategy for your new office/s is crucial within this.

Excelien explores how to formulate and develop on an efficient and productive IT procurement strategy and allow you to expand into further markets whether its the US, EMEA, APAC or Africa. We highlight six essential elements to look out for, follow these, and you can be confident that you’re making the right choices.

The Foundation of IT Procurement Planning

To be successful in expanding into further markets, define an accurate blueprint for how you envisage your IT procurement to look in your new region, whether its a carbon copy of your current site or completely new.

It’s tempting to keep IT procurement local, and with current suppliers. Still, often this adds costs and complexity and can result in timezone issues, delivery issues or non-compliant IT solutions that are not fit for purpose.

Let us revise that plan. It’s better to build a procurement function within your new territory or outsource procurement to a partner with deep experience within the region.

Why Tech Specs Matter

Once you’ve set up the infrastructure to support the users, policies to be enforced, and a strategy which allows your to expand seamlessly with your growth plan, you need to think about what solutions will support your users and business needs.

Balancing your decision here is no picnic; you can under specify requirements and achieve short term goals with budgets but fail long-term goals related to growth and risking employee productivity. But on the other side, you can over-specify, over-spend and lose credibility.

It’s not as simple as getting the raw technical specs correct. Take into consideration what is the purpose of the office, is it offering the same service as the head office, will it have a support team, are the users home or office-based. Choosing the right device for your employees is imperative, and can support talent acquisition.

Gen Z and Millennials, for instance, aspire to be part of a company that lets them work on tablets, phones, and PCs alike—and preferably across all devices seamlessly. Considering that by 2025 roughly 75% of the workforce will be made up of millennials and Gen Z, your device procurement could make a big difference to your organisation’s ability to attract talent in the future.

The Hidden Costs of Great Tech

The Apple iPhone was created in 2007, fast forward 13 years and think how fast technology has moved, take this approach to your technology and where the market is now, and how it will look down the road when you’re making procurement decisions.

A common problem a few years ago, you may order hundreds of Laptops for a vendor whether its HP, Lenovo, Apple or Dell, only for them to change their charging port to USB-C after. Suddenly you have hundreds of laptops that use old peripherals, and consequently, the market price has also dropped. Frustration from your employees because they haven’t got the latest technology and for you now having assets which have moved on.

But partner with an experienced and knowledgable procurement provider, whether that is local or in another region, you can be assured your tech solutions, and purchases are future-proofed.

An experienced procurement provider will ensure they are always ahead of the market news and can relay these updates on to you, often companies turn to tin or box shifters low cost and low service value. With the right partner, you’ll get the right solutions for the right region, with no nasty surprises that cost you time and money.

Consider How Things Operate Across Borders.

Once you step across the borders, there’s more to consider and acknowledge how your systems and IT solutions deliver their services. You also need to think carefully about work cultures, and people work.

It reaps benefits to consider the softer side of management in geo-dispersed locations, such as how to:

  • Work productively across varied languages and maintain global communications.
  • Navigate diverse business cultures (for example, some countries may be more flexible to remote working, while others may be very centred around working in the same office).
  • Get the most from a different hiring pool; diverse skills and expertise can benefit your organisation.
  • Efficiently pay and receive payment in different currencies.
  • Manage varied customs, laws, and tariffs on imports and exports.

There’s, even more, to think about if you’re expanding into multiple regions simultaneously. Do you plan to move into a few different countries at the same time?

For example, will you need different keyboards to cater for different languages between your territories? And what happens when your people have to travel between regions? Can your IT equipment and peripherals help people work seamlessly wherever they go, or will they be stuck having to carry around an endless power supply adapters?

Where will your equipment fit

More often than not, the kit you procure goes straight to the end-user or direct to the data centre. But, what do you do about the charging cables, keyboards and other peripherals you want to keep in stock?  

Filling up your new office with equipment which is there as surplus and back up, is not efficient practise, also difficult to monitor if you’re based overseas. 

This leaves with you a few options, look into a just-in-time fulfilment approach, either from your suppliers directly, or through a trusted procurement partner. Alternatively, if you need to stock hold because hardware might be build to order or have lead times associated, you can look at your procurement partner to set up secure and easy to manage fulfilment centres. By procuring solutions as and when you need them, you can get everyone the devices and kit they require.

Technical & Cultural Challenges with a Global Procurement Partner

Embarking in new markets is exciting, you learn and develop new skills, and this requires a comprehensive understanding of the technologies the users, organisation, and you need – and the providers that can offer it in those new locations you expand into.

Beyond understanding and overcoming the technical challenges, consideration for culture and customs is something which requires significant focus. For example, how does your new office view remote working or contractors? Is working from home an option available, or will you need to remote meeting and collaboration solutions? What about contacting each other, do they have preferred methods like IM, Socials, or mobile? Do users regularly travel from country to country?

Supporting Staff

In an ideal world, you want people on the ground with a mixture of extensive procurement and fulfilment expertise and comprehensive local knowledge. It’s these factors that will make sure your expansion goes as smoothly as possible. 

Nevertheless, obtaining these skills internally is going to be a challenge, unnecessary commercial overhead, and time-consuming. Countless businesses lean on a procurement partner to manage the burden for them.

As you know, there’s more to procurement than just getting the right kit to the right people. If you treat procurement as a purely transactional function, that’s what you’ll get. But if you’re willing to work with a strategic partner, your procurement can add high-level value to the business. This will enable you to pursue your expansion and digital transformation initiatives with confidence.

At Excelien, we have extensive experience in navigating both the technical and cultural challenges of global expansion. In fact, we’ve helped some of the biggest businesses in the world successfully grow into new territories.

Are you interested in expanding into further countries? It’s likely that you’re experiencing (or will soon encounter) a range of technical, financial, and cultural challenges.

If you’d like to talk through these challenges and learn more about how Excelien can help you solve them, contact one of our procurement experts.

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Excelien Partners with Talkdesk

Excelien continues growing its vendor community partnering with Talkdesk, an enterprise cloud contact centre (CCaaS) that empowers companies to make customer experience their competitive advantage.

The partnership held the solution to the common problems our clients have endured. The ease of integrations, reducing costs, decreasing ramp-up time for the agent, improving employee satisfaction and having a platform that is straightforward to manage and doesn’t require specialists to operate. Talkdesk has already established a name within the CCaaS market with clients such as Tandem Bank, TAP Air Portugal, Trivago and IBM.

The challenge is that most contact centre technology out there today can’t meet these modern customer needs. Most were built 20+ years ago, before the digital revolution. These systems operate as channel silos, with little or no integration to CRM or other systems. They are inflexible, hard to adapt to the everchanging business needs and expensive to maintain. These systems lack innovation, so adopting new technology like AI is virtually impossible. And this isn’t just a problem with on-premises systems, its also an issue with first-generation cloud solutions.

Ease of Integrations

The fact we’re in an era where innovative collaboration and productivity tools are growing faster than ever, to be able to meet the demand for integrations quickly and easily is what IT teams need.

Gone are the days of getting in developers to create APIs, with Talkdesk AppConnect you’re able to extend capabilities with push-button integrations with over 100+ partners. AppConnect is recognised by Gartner as the industry’s first app marketplace for the contact centre.

AppConnect gives you the flexibility to test the integrations for 30 days for free, and then co-term with the monthly payments. The apps require no long-term commitment and plans can be modified, upgraded or cancelled at any time.

Reducing Costs

Understanding Cost Avoidance vs. Cost Reduction is the message we want our clients to understand. If the main focus is on what you’re paying now, you’ll be likely to be in a scenario of you get what you pay for, and potentially at risk not being able to scale for future growth.

With Talkdesk, we see that it addresses cost reduction in further areas such as automation through IVR and AI, agent attrition and missed call opportunities which helps your business build up more profit over time. We also look at how we can reduce operational costs, and unaccounted costs such as efficiency, self-service adoption, integration workflows, and disaster preparedness.

It’s about thinking long term.

The Stats Speak the Truth

In the world of sales, if you’re referred to someone or recommended a product you’re 72% more likely to purchase it. Talkdesk has some great accolades having the most and best reviews with Gartner, G2Crowd and Salesforce AppExchange

And being recognised by their clients as well as Gartner has resulted in Talkdesk to enter the Leader quadrant for the Contact Centre as a Service Magic Quadrant. Talkdesk is one of only three vendors appearing in both the North American quadrant and Western Europe Contact Center as a Service Magic Quadrant making Talkdesk an exceptional option for companies requiring an end to end solution for contact centres globally. Talkdesk is the most recent vendor to be in the leadership quadrant and the fastest company ever to make it into the leadership quadrant.

 

Improving Customer Experience

On average there are 7 stages of transition through the customer experience life cycle, and we look at how Talkdesk manages these, and how it minimises customer effort, boost customer satisfaction, maximise resources and ultimately generate revenue.

 

1 – Method of Communication

Customers are not the same as 10 years ago, they’ve shifted from how they traditionally got in contact, they expect to be able to contact you via IM, Whatsapp, Socials and some just don’t want to chase and want the company to contact them back at a convenient time.

Talkdesk provides access through all these contact channels whether its Web, Mobile, Social, Email, Visual/Video or Live Chat.

2 – CRM Integration

Customers expect a personal experience, and to do so, CRM integrations need to present context to the agent and contact centres with real-time information about customers, empowering your agent to have more intelligent and seamless conversations.

Whether that identification is their account number, email address or number, it can help quickly identify and address the customer, allowing more profound insights into what the call might be, and promptly personalise the callers information.

 

3 – IVR & Self-Service

We all have shortcuts to get around the IVR, such pressing 5 “if you’re planning to leave the service” (which would usually get answered quicker!). Talkdesk empowers the customer to use self-service and cut costs by freeing up agents.

As customers call in, the IVR can quickly distinguish customers needs and have them directed to specific agents. This frees up unnecessary time trying to guide the customer to the correct agent, the customer can speak to some who specialises in their topic. If a customer just needs to know their balance on an account or when a bill is due – that’s something an IVR can handle.

4 -Intelligent, Skills-Based Routing

Talkdesk wants to deliver exception customer experience, but how?

We connect the customer with the best available agents based on their skills, reducing interaction time, improving the quality of service and reducing re-queues. There is also the ability to provide real-time information to the customer about their wait time, queue position and options to opt for callbacks. The intelligent mapping of calls can prioritise high valued or high-risk accounts, getting them to agents as quickly as possible

5 – Efficiency Tools

Talkdesk generates efficiency for common tasks with tools like disposition codes or preview dialers, these can conserve time and improve agent utilisation and productivity.

Preview dialers allow outbound reps to have context prior to calling, and power dialers can decrease the time it takes to place calls and leave messages and can move seamlessly onto their next conversation.

Disposition codes help complete everyday tasks to help improve agent productivity by decreasing after-call work and allowing these to be easily indexed within the Talkdesk reporting.

6 – Reporting & Analytics

The Talkdesk dashboard allows you to gain real-time visibility and administration with real-time reporting and advanced analytics. Instead of worrying about code to building out your metrics, you have simple click functionality to create instantaneous dashboards to proactively run your contact centre, leveraging BI to uncover insights and optimise your team.

7 – Workforce Engagement

Beyond the dashboard and reporting, you want to engage your staff wherever the agents are located, whether they’re remote, based in different time zones or part-time during the busy periods such as Christmas. Talkdesk allows you to create the right balance between cost and service-level management. Talkdesk provides tools to forecast contact volume, schedule contact centre staff based on workload and plan for future events.

Talkdesk can evaluate & benchmark agent performance, which means they can adequately reward or promote agents with accurate depictions of their performance. To help with that, they can ensure compliance with call & screen recording.

 

Talkdesk for the Future

Excelien see Talkdesk as the future of contact centre services with the speed of innovation which Talkdesk is developing, being cloud-native, AI deeply embedded within the platform, an industry-unique App Ecosystem and agile development of new capabilities – it leaps ahead over its competitors.

And for our clients, Talkdesk is Customer-Experience obsessed, with one of the only vendors to deliver a 100% uptime SLA, achieve 98% CSAT rating from their customers and over 134% net retention.

Our cloud advisory team at Excelien are experienced in deploying a range of contact centre rollouts through every step of the journey, and our consultants can navigate you to see how Talkdesk can increase productivity, manage costs and move to a futureproofed solution.

 

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Where has the demand been shifted in Technology?

We work with over 150+ vendors and partners, continually in contact with them. Rather than selling the technology, we looked into how they’ve adapted and what they see as the latest trends.

 

Our partner network says COVID-19 has changed their organisation focus, with some hitting their yearly targets within two months – some having their technology consumption go from 1.5m users to 10m within 21 days – others adapting and creating short-term offerings to plug the hole which they anticipate.

 

The COVID-19 pandemic initially frightened shareholders, investors, vendors and solution providers’ plans for 2020 in the cloud technology market. However, soon after, technology priorities shifted as their prospects and customers faced the pandemic’s force of either group to remote and work from home scenarios or suspending operations entirely.

After enduring weeks of pandemic situations and understanding the beginnings of what a recovery will look like, solution providers are starting to recognise the short-term technology demands of the prospects and customers. According to research by The 2112 Group, these are what solution providers say are the top 5 technologies for the remainder of 2020.

5. Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR)

Companies understand that their operations will cease if they cannot have access to their data and IT resources.   Nevertheless, business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) services are gaining revived recognition in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Businesses are reevaluating their business continuity plans and resources as they identified gaps in their capabilities during the shift to decreased operations and remote workforces.

 

 

4. Networking

Though basic infrastructure and network may not be the most riveting technology, yet one-quarter (26%) of solution providers claim switching and routing will continue to be an essential product set. Businesses are reevaluating their network capacity demand to account for the shifting use cases as a consequence of the pandemic. Many companies anticipate reconfiguring their networks to support more remote connections and reduced latency for cloud-based applications.

 

 

3. Communications and Collaboration

Before the pandemic, Zoom established itself as one of the popular kids of the cloud-based video conferencing platforms. With Microsoft Teams physically distanced, Zoom with its minimal subscription and free offering sprinted on ahead overnight. Microsoft Teams, Cisco WebEx, and Google Meet observed growth in demand and utilisation. Every video conferencing, collaboration, and unified communications service is witnessing growth as businesses look to empower their new work from home contact centre and aiding the workforce to keep connected during social distancing. As we all look to the recovery period, many think working from home will become the new norm and permanent for many people, shaping communications and collaboration as a red-hot commodity for the foreseeable future.

 

2. Cloud Infrastructure Services

The cloud is earning its keep throughout the pandemic. Each company reluctant around migrating their infrastructure to the cloud – in both hosted or hybrid configurations – discovered promptly through their pandemic encounter the need of having access to data and resources. While the economy took a high in the first quarter as spending came to a sudden halt, cloud service providers witnessed considerable increases in their sales and consumption.

 

 

 

 

1. Security

For the past couple of years, Security technologies are always high on the agenda and demand as the threat of hackers is everywhere, and growing government regulations enforce data protection. The pandemic exposed new problems with IT security: An uneven distribution. As businesses moved to a work from home strategy, they soon realised that their security standards weren’t up to the job. People leaving the office were now using home PCs with consumer operating systems, inadequate security software, and poorly secured WiFi networks. Security technologies – especially managed security services – is witnessing growing demand as business reinforce their data protection measures to account for their distributed workforces.

 

 

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Understanding Shared Responsibility for Microsoft Azure

Security of the Azure Cloud

Microsoft Azure cloud services provide excellent financial and technical advantages, providing you a route to on-demand deployments of applications and IT resources via the internet with consumption-based pricing. Security is a high priority for deploying on Microsoft, and Azure, and distributes this security responsibilities with you to provide the highest level of protection.

 

Azure maintains the underlying infrastructure, and you must secure the workloads running on Azure. The security configuration options you choose relies on the sensitivity of your workload and the services you are using in Azure. For Azure infrastructure services, such as Azure VMs and Azure Storage, you have various options around which security regulations you set up. Using Azure VMs, you have total control of when patches are made along with any software you install, meaning you need to protect your systems, and patchin the same way you manage your existing machines today. If you have managed services such as Azure Machine Learning, Azure AppServices or Azure SQL, configuring security controls like patching the guest OS or maintaining instances or applications is nothing to worry about — Microsoft handles that for you. No matter which services you are utilising, it is still essential to understand your responsibilities.

What is Shared Security Responsibility?

The below model shows a breakdown of responsibilities between Microsoft and you:

For IaaS workloads in Azure, Microsoft is liable for securing the foundational services of the cloud, such as database, storage, compute power, and networking services. You’re responsible for the configuration of those services and your data on the cloud. You are responsible for network traffic protection, and any incident reporting. The application security components of your site are also your responsibility.

For PaaS workloads, such as Azure AppServices or SQL, Microsoft is responsible for managing the security of the Host Infrastructure (VMs) and Network Controls (Virtual Networks, Endpoints, and Network Security Groups or Access Control Lists).

Microsoft’s Active Directory and Azure Active Directory can be used to manage the Access Management area. However, this is something you have to implement and configure for your IaaS or PaaS deployments.

Alert Logic has solutions that help your organisation address the areas you are responsible for with your host infrastructure, network controls, application-level controls, and client & endpoint protection.

7 Best Practices for Cloud Security

There are seven essential best practices for cloud security that you should implement to protect yourself from the next vulnerability and/or wide-scale attack:

1. Secure Your Code

Securing code is your responsibility, and applications are an increasingly popular entry point into IT systems. Code that has not been thoroughly tested and secure makes it all the easier for attackers to do harm. Make sure that security is part of your software development lifecycle from the start: testing your libraries, scanning plugins, etc.

2. Create An Access Management Policy

Logins are the keys to your kingdom and should be treated as such. Access management is critical across IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS deployments. Make sure you have a solid access management policy in place, especially concerning those who are granted access temporarily. Integration of all applications and cloud environments into your corporate AD or LDAP centralised authentication model will help with this process, as will two-factor authentication.

3. Adopt a Patch Management Approach

Unpatched software and systems can lead to major issues; keep your environment secure by outlining a process where you update your systems regularly. Consider developing a checklist of essential procedures, and testing all updates to confirm that they do not damage or create vulnerabilities before implementation into your live environment. Microsoft manages this for the PaaS and SaaS services, but it is crucial to understand how they patch these workloads and when that can affect your services.

4. Log Management

Log reviews should be an essential component of your organisation’s security protocols. Logs are now useful for far more than compliance; they have become a powerful security tool. You can use log data to monitor for malicious activity and forensic investigation.

5. Build A Security Tool Kit

No single piece of software is going to handle all of your security needs. You have to implement a defence-in-depth strategy that covers all your responsibilities – Implement IP tables, web application firewalls, antivirus, intrusion detection, encryption, and log management.

6. Stay Informed

Stay informed of the latest vulnerabilities that may affect you. The internet is a wealth of information, so use it to your advantage by searching for the breaches and exploits that are happening in your industry. See the resources below for more details.

7. Understand Your Cloud Service Provider Security Model

Finally, as discussed, get to know your provider, understand where the lines are drawn and plan accordingly. By having a solid security-in-depth strategy, coupled with the right tools and people that understand how to respond, you will put yourself into a position to minimise your exposure and risk.

Resources available to you

Let Excelien keep you up-to-date of the latest developments in the cloud security industry – from emerging security threats to the most recent changes in compliance regulations through a variety of resources, including:

• Alert Logic Weekly Threat Report – Subscribe to receive a weekly email of the three most significant breaches of the week from around the globe and the Top 20 malicious IP addresses.
https://www.alertlogic.com/weekly-threat-report/

• Cloud Security Reports – Updated regularly based on a comparative analysis of security threats across thousands of Alert Logic customers with infrastructures in either enterprise data centres or the cloud environments of more than 20 hosting providers.
https://www.alertlogic.com/resources/cloud-security-report/

• Alert Logic Blog – Subscribe to our blog which provides commentary on topics that are related to our technologies, such as log management, threat management and IT compliance management.
https://www.alertlogic.com/resources/blog/

 

 

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Dialpad – Goodbye Cord. Hello Future!

Excelien is excited with its latest partnership with Dialpad, a company making monumental moves in Silicon Valley and counts Netflix, Uber and Xero in their client base. Dialpad has already made its name in the UCaaS market for being the leading technology behind Yahoo Voice, Grand Central, and Google Voice. What came next is a Unified Communication and Contact Centre platform, which revolutionises the way companies operate. DialPad is entirely home-grown, created and developed for the cloud, meaning they can develop and issue the latest innovations at an accelerated pace compared to their adversaries, which would tend to rely on 3rd party products to piece together an offering. 

Integrate and Collaborate

Dialpad desired a service which worked the way employees worked – on any device and from any location. It originated with designing seamless integrations with all significant applications, with email systems like G-Suite and O365, Servicedesk integrations such as Zendesk and Jira, Collaboration tool integrations with Slack or Linkedin and CRM’s such as Salesforce and Hubspot – All within a single pane of glass. As Dialpad is a 100% cloud-based platform, it syncs voice, video, contacts, and more in real-time within the integrations, meaning Dialpad can be the core of the user.

Video Calling

The conception of simplicity and ease of use is the focus of Dialpad. An example is Uberconference (was created before Uber!) has no PINs, no software to download, which means no hassle. With features such as Call Transcription and Voice AI available in real-time, you can get even more out from your conference calls. Dialpad creates products focused around exceptional user experiences and simplicity is core to everything Dialpad do.

 

Voice Transcription

Have you ever experienced awkward silences on calls or video-conferences were users are writing down notes rather than listening or forgetting a key point from earlier? With VoiceAI before, throughout, and following every call. It is actively building to-do lists, finding answers to tough questions, and it’s discovering trends and insights that become common over time. As long as someone is talking within Dialpad, Vi is there making that conversation smarter and better.

Supporting Sales Teams and Agents

Dialpad Support and Sell offer innovative services for sales teams, contact centre agents and support staff, with the idea of simplicity at the core, users have a single platform with native integrations plus real-time coaching and suggestions. An example an agent can be on a call and real-time recommendations of how to answer the questions can pop-up and even highlighting previous conversations about topics related to the call. As data grows from your calls, the system will proceed to get more intelligent, empowering your agents further.

Excelien looks into the top 3 features of Dialpad Sell and Support.

1 – Dialpad help you identify who to call.

Dialpad maps the purchase intent and sentiment so Sales teams can identify who to call first. Dialpad looks at previous data to see if the prospect previously mentioned they had the budget, it was the right time, and isn’t using a competitor vs the one that said several competitors, and maybe a more competitive, longer sales cycle. Dialpad Sell helps save time, distinguish who to call, and know that it’s the right person to call.

2 – We help you know what to say.

Dialpad will save your users time on calls by taking notes for them. Providing real-time transcriptions they can reference, bringing up recommendations to questions they might not know how to answer, and even ensure they’re following the sales process or playbook you have in place. The goal is to help you understand what is happening in these conversations and to support your users in having better, smoother, and more viable sales conversations. Dialpad removes the “I don’t know moments”, ensure they’re following the playbook, and provide them with reminders on how to answer those tough questions around the competition or that new feature.

3 – We help you know what happened.

Everything post-call we refer to as Google Search for your conversations. All of your calls and indexed, searchable, and shareable. Want to know how often a competitor is named, or someone talks about that new product? It’s a few clicks away. Shortly, you’ll be able to build call libraries of entire calls or specific moments of calls to enable your team to learn from their colleague’s conversations and help your team learn from each other or share best practices. You’ll also be able to take all of this data with you and push it to a data studio to combine with other data sources if that’s of interest.

Dialpad Sell

Dialpad Support

Security and Compliance

Security will be part of any project, and the telephone system is no different. Dialpad provides a range of security features from single sign-on capabilities to automated user provisioning. Dialpad allows integrations for access management through SAML and SCIM, integrating into providers like Azure, GSuite, OneLogin, Okta, and more. Calls with Dialpad across the VoIP network, as well as in transit web requests is encrypted utilising TLS and application data that is permanently stored at rest uses AES 256-bit within Google Cloud Platform. Dialpad will support your organisation to meet GDPR compliance obligations through features such as retention policies, data subject access requests, and specific consent mechanisms. Dialpad offers customers a Data Protection Agreement (DPA) and is also a Privacy Shield compliant. 

Business Continuity and Call Quality

Dialpad sits within the Google Cloud platform on a split-cloud architecture with Data Centres in every region, so anywhere you are based, you are receiving the most reliable service and enterprise call quality. The capacity to move data centres upon calling is seamless to the end-user, so they’ll receive the same user-experience anywhere in the world they are.

Committed to Service

At the speed UCaaS and CCaaS are growing, Dialpad will not leave you behind – the customer support is fundamental to the Dialpad ethos. The natural growth for many of the trading and largest UC and CC vendors is they churn and burn, acquiring customers, but not giving organisations (especially the SMB market) the concentration and support they need to be thriving customers. Dialpad offers 24/7 end-user support, as well as a comprehensive professional services plan with a Customer Success Manager, a Technical Manager, and an Implementation Manager. Dialpad is an agile, fast-growing organisation that ensures customer benefit and satisfaction is at the top of our priority list, not merely getting the customer on the books.

 

Our cloud advisory team at Excelien are experts in a range of Unified Communications and Contact Centre rollouts. Please speak to one of our cloud consultants today to see how we can increase productivity, manage costs and move to a futureproofed solution.

 Begin your 14 day trial with DialPad!

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