Modern Collaboration

Whether from home or the office, many workers still feel more comfortable with physical desktop phones and headsets as opposed to soft phone clients. Darren Knapp from Poly talks about recent innovations to these venerable endpoints.

How can you help your remote workers when you aren't there? Crisantos talks about AI-enabled analytics, remote coaching, and what the future of remote work may shake up to be.

According to the CEO of CafeX, Rami Musallam, advanced collaboration is all about finding ways to eliminate friction in internal company processes as well as while interacting with customers.  In this insightful podcast interview we dig into how cutting edge technologies, like Chime, their one-click video conferencing platform, are delivering seamless collaboration from the boardroom to the contact center. We discuss what it really takes to make video a single click experience, whether you are at your desktop or using the company telepresence room.  We also review how enabling collaboration technologies like desktop sharing, allows businesses to take customer care to the next level by saving time and lowering the risk of unhappy customers. Take a listen, you'll be happy you did.   

Customer Experience Management (CEM) is quickly becoming a strategic imperative for brands in a multitude of industries.  And it's no wonder, with a recent report stating that within two years CEM will be more important to a customer's perception of a brand than their product or the price of the product. To learn more about this critical topic and how innovative companies are looking to deploy the right technology in their contact centers and throughout the enterprise, take a listen to this interview with David Jodoin, the Chief Technology Officer at CafeX.  We dig into the trends impacting the market, the role mobile technologies and applications are playing, how WebRTC is changing the game in video in contact centers and ways in which companies are working to create a more personal connection with their customers while quickly solving their problems. If your job is to make sure your customers are happy, this podcast is a must listen.

Have you ever considered what your collaboration style is?  What about your colleagues or your boss?  In this podcast interview with Leo Tucker, Global Vice President of Marketing at PGi, we dig into the findings of their recent survey that looks to answer this question.  They interviewed business people from a thousand companies and gathered information on one hundred different factors that influence collaboration to get a baseline understanding of the various ways in which business people collaborate and how businesses can benefit by applying this understanding to their own companies. We review the findings in detail, including their breakdown of business people into 5 different 'types' of collaborators: Casual, Meticulous, Practical, Savvy and Progressive.  If you are looking to gain a deeper understanding of how the employees and departments in your business collaborate and what this can mean to ensuring you make the right types of investments in the right kinds of technology, this podcast is a must liste

Open Source UC is consistently one of the most searched for terms on The UC Buyer so we dig in deeper in this information packed interview with Jerry Stabile, CEO and Founder of Commercial Open Source UC vendor, eZuce. We discuss the benefits and challenges of Open Source UC, the types of companies that is right for, virutalization, cloud and UCaaS implications and how the SipXCom open source project is working to keep up with the breakneck speed of change in the communications industry.   If your business is considering UC and looking at Open Source as an option, this podcast is worth your time on the way to or from work.  Don't forget to subscribe to our podcasts at iTunes or via RSS.

Over and over at The UC Buyer we have heard that one of the biggest risks to Cloud-based UC is a corporate network that is not up for the job.  In this detailed podcast with Stephen Farkough, the Vice President of Information Systems at UCaaS solution provider Broadview Networks, we discuss the network challenges that businesses face when deploying UCaaS and what they can do to prevent them.   We talk about  jitter and latency and their causes including router configurations, firewall setup and bandwidth.  We also dive into their new solution allows their channel partners to perform in-depth, long-term pre-test of a company's network readiness that identifies any issues so they can be addressed before pulling the trigger on UCaaS deployment.  If you're considering cloud-UC, you definitely should take a listen.

In this insightful discussion with Derek Yoo, CTO of Fuze (formerly ThinkingPhones) we get into the details on the trends impacting the enterprise communications space and what is driving the movement towards Unified Communications in the cloud.  We discuss the impact of consumerization of IT, the various freemium collaboration solutions in the market and how UC and UCaaS vendors are adapting to continue delivering a high level of value and service to their enterprise customers. If you're considering UCaaS or are interested in where the market is headed, this is a must listen.

The way we use voice communications in business has changed more in the last 10 years than it has in the last 40. In this information packed conversation with Urban Gillis, Vice President of Distribution and Channel Sales at headset maker Jabra, we discuss the different ways that business people use phone calls and how businesses can categorize them into user types.  In particular, we dig into the specifics around the "Call-Centric" user type and the various types of professionals whose jobs revolve around taking, making and managing high volumes of calls. We also dig into how unified communications, mobility and increased collaboration opportunities have turned headsets into a billion dollar market and how businesses are working to deploy and maintain the right types of audio endpoints for the right types of workers. If your business is looking to deploy a UC solution, improve your collaboration capabilities or ensure your employees are as productive as possible, this podcast is for you. 

Customer engagements have changed more over the last five years than they have in the previous thirty, according to Natalie Keightley, the Contact Center Product Marketing Lead for the EMEA region at Avaya.  Customers are mobile first, demand service in whatever channel and on whatever device suits them, expect companies to know everything about their history (regardless of channel) and insist they solve their problems immediately.   In this insightful podcast, we dig into how customers are moving to make a superior customer experience the cornerstone of their brand.  We discuss how businesses are changing mindsets to deploy successful omni-channel customer service, the role that integrated self-service plays and how solutions like Avaya Breeze are helping businesses easily embed communications capabilities wherever they are needed (mobile apps, websites, enterprise apps like CRM, etc.). If your business is ready to take customer experience management to the next level, this is definitely worth the listen!

This year is the year of video, but so was last year, and next year will be the year of video as well.  That's according to Ira Weinstein, video conferencing and collaboration specialist and partner at Wainhouse Research.  We dig into how the video conferencing market is evolving, the challenges keeping it from meeting its promise and how new solutions from service providers, like Yorktel's Univago virtual meeting rrom platform, are starting to tear down those barriers and open up access to visual collaboration. If you are an SMB or a larger enterprise looking for ways to take video to the next level in your company, this podcast is definitely worth the listen.

Improved interactions with customers and greater internal efficiency has always been the promise of WebRTC and with the standard solidifying and Microsoft and Apple getting on board, businesses are now really starting to take advantage of it.  In this insightful interview with Xander Dumaine, Senior Software Engineer at Interactive Intelligence, we get into the details of where WebRTC is headed, the benefits to businesses and customers and why they have moved quickly to deploy their Contact Center solution as a WebRTC native application.   We discuss market demand for WebRTC, how businesses and customers benefit from WebRTC capabilities and the types of capabilities WebRTC can deliver (no download screen sharing, video collaboration with contact center agents, etc.) that have never been feasible before.  If you are looking to leverage WebRTC to improve internal contact center operations and improve the customer experience, this podcast is a must listen.