Page 6 - Telecom Reseller January-February 2020

6 Telecom Reseller VASILI TRIANT
online and on chat and social networks,
and the self-service many customers initially flock to in order to solve a problem - and you understand immediately how disastrous an outage can be.
As most industries have embraced cloud-based offerings for their call centers, vendors have responded with (sometimes empty) promises of close to 100 percent uptime. Here are some ways you can sniff out which uptime promises are true and which ones may negatively impact the customer “experience,” which many argue is as important as any sales or marketing activity.
1. Understand the Uptime Service Level Agreement (SLA)
Cloud vendors throw a lot of numbers around as it relates to uptime. It’s up to you to understand what’s in your contract and hold your vendor to it. When evaluating, understand the depth of the vendor’s global network of telecom providers. Do they have multiple carriers to ensure redundancy and avoid service interruptions if one system goes down? No matter how much they boast of exceptional uptime, technology will always break. Do they have the backup measures in place for when it does?
If a vendor is going to charge you more for uptime, make sure you know what you’re getting in return.
2. Where are the cloud data centers - and how many?
In serving your customers, you need confidence: not just in your people to have a customer-first technology, but in your technology to support it. Take Cognosante,
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the healthcare IT services company, for instance. The company used different contact center software in four different locations. In consolidating to one cloud vendor, Cognosante ensured that each location was backed by multiple cloud
data centers (commonly known as
“servers”) around the world to ensure reliability through redundancy and active failover, making its operations more efficient and reducing cost and maintenance.
Check to ensure what reliability measures are in place.
3. Understand the economics
The cloud is a wonderful thing: it has reduced the number of systems your IT department needs to manage and made it easier for your customers to engage. But
if it all falls apart - and remember, we are dealing with technology that at some point will fail even if it’s only for milliseconds
- understand the costs associated with it. Cloud has delivered on its promises: outages happen less frequently and for a short period of time and businesses are no longer locked into expensive, lengthy agreements that lead to vendor lock-in. Plus, every cloud vendor worth its salt will cover outages,
but know ahead of time what those outages cost. There’s a big difference in business
lost for a 30-second outage versus a 30-minute one.
Uptime stands to be a great differentiator for your business and can separate your customer experience from the rest of the industry - provided you understand your vendor’s uptime SLA and what happens
in the event there is downtime in the network. ■
January/February 2020
Vonage Partners with Artificial Solutions to Deliver Conversational AI
HOLMDEL, NJ - Vonage (Nasdaq:VG),
a global business cloud communications leader, has entered a partnership agreement with Artificial Solutions®, (SSME:ASAI)
the leading specialist in enterprise-strength conversational AI. Together, the companies have introduced a new connector that integrates Teneo®, a conversational AI development and analytics platform, into Vonage’s API solutions.
Teneo customers can now deploy their conversational AI applications into new channels by leveraging Vonage APIs, making it easier to manage multiple channels such
as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Viber, Voice or SMS from a single platform.
“Communications into the next decade needs to be more flexible, intelligent and personal,” says Mark Summerson, VP Partners at Vonage. “Working with Artificial Solutions enables us to offer our customers access to advanced conversational AI technology and easily incorporate it into their existing communications platforms.”
Using Teneo, Artificial Solutions’ conversational AI development platform, Vonage customers can automate their agent-based live chats and take their support channels to the next level, streamlining operations, while offering a personalized human-like interaction and extending the service to 365 and 24/7.
“Vonage has an enviable reputation in
the CPaaS marketplace and we’re delighted to be working with the company to
extend the channel capabilities of Teneo on a consolidated cloud communications platform,” says Robert Wilson-Fry,
Senior Director, Strategic Partnerships
of Artificial Solutions. “This partnership follows the announcement last month of Teneo Connectors, a new resource in our conversational AI development platform that allows chatbots to harness the power of back-office technology to deliver even greater intelligence and capabilities.”
With Teneo Connectors, enterprises
can easily integrate a wide variety of back-end systems and processes into their conversational AI interface using a pre-
built library of intelligent connectors that span a range of business and AI assets including RPA (robotic process automation) and CPaaS (Communications Platform
as a Service). This expands the chatbot’s capabilities and enables it to deliver more intelligent responses based on the back-
end actions, requests and processes it has executed. Combined with the power of
the Vonage communications platform, businesses can build next-generation customer experiences at every touchpoint and create meaningful, memorable customer journeys.
More at www.vonage.com and www. artificial-solutions.com. ■
Stop Unwanted Robocalls
Unwanted robocalls have gone from a nuisance to a serious problem:
• There were 3.4 billion robocalls in April 2018—the biggest month ever.
• The Do-Not-Call list isn’t working.
• Perpetrators are neighbor-spoofing with fake caller IDs to trick
people into answering their robocalls.
• Robocalls are filling carrier networks, yet call completion rates are down because people aren’t answering their phone calls—higher costs, lower revenues.
Robocall Solutions
TransNexus software provides several methods of preventing robocalls from flooding your network and bothering your customers:
• Robocalling fraud triggers
• Targeted pumping triggers
• Reputation service
• Blacklisting to prevent neighbor-spoofing
• Customer-maintained blacklists
• Shield database of high-risk numbers
• Secure Telephone Identity (STI) using STIR/SHAKEN
For information about these robocall prevention capabilities, visit our website at bit.ly/robocall-prevention or email info@transnexus.com.
About TransNexus
TransNexus is a leader in developing innovative software to manage and protect telecommunications networks. We have over 20 years' experience in providing telecom software for least-cost routing, billing support and prevention of telecom fraud and robocalls. For more information, visit our website at transnexus.com.
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