An overwhelming majority of companies in a recent survey said that they are pursuing a cloud adoption strategy with the primary goals of improving IT efficiencies and reducing costs. According to a Dimensional Research survey, 92 percent of those surveyed said that cloud—be it private, third-party private, public or hybrid models—is a strategic initiative going forward in order to help their businesses run more effectively from an operational standpoint. That’s not to say that they haven’t embraced the cloud already. More than one third of those surveyed have a quarter or more of all services in that model. Interestingly, a full 72 percent of respondents indicated that tracking cloud usage and costs is extremely or very important to their IT function. Respondents’ top features on that wish-list include: Improve IT forecasting (57 percent), expand on-demand/self-service access to the cloud (34 percent), and the ability to better match allocation vs. utilization (30 percent). Star2Star’s scalable cloud communications platform offers flexible functionality and a variety of service options, allowing companies to use the communications features they need without having to pay for those they don’t. Executives have different communications needs than secretaries, and secretaries have different communications needs than the sales force. Star2Star’s system can provide different telephones with different capabilities so every employee has the tools needed to get their job done efficiently and cost-effectively.
AccuVoIP Services. Contact http://www.accuvoipservices.com/ at 262-649-1097 They’ll analyze your current situation and expenses and show you exactly how much money you’ll save with Star2Star. In most cases, you can even keep your old phone numbers.
Monday, October 19, 2015
Monday, October 12, 2015
VoIP Phones Systems are best for Multi Location Dealership
Gurley Leep is a household name in the Greater Indiana region. The auto dealership operates ten separate locations and specializes in variety. Mercedes-Benz, GMC, Volkswagen, Buick, commercial trucks, pre-owned vehicles are all part of of their inventory.
Like most dealerships, Gurley has a main office on each lot along with a service department, and runs its business every day, meaning that salespeople and repair persons are often “on-call.” The customer service operation relies on queuing and scheduling appointments and must also juggle walk-ins, or “drive-ins” as the case may be. Because it needs to send out loan documents and insurance papers, reliable faxing is a must for regulatory compliance.
Until recently, Brandon was struggling along with an analog telephone system that provided very limited, basic functionality. Workers relied on multiple calls and ad-hoc communications to make sure everyone was where they were supposed to be, and there was no appropriate way to track things other than by spreadsheets and manual processes. It was complex, messy, and inefficient.
Even worse, the system was also starting to break down, making maintenance a big headache for the company.
“One night we stayed out here until four in the morning fixing the problem,” said Brandon, Gurley's sales and service manager and IT manager. “We had no choice. Our phones are our lifeblood.”
AccuVoIP Services, Brandon's trusted communications vendor for 3 years, recommended making the switch to Star2Star’s Scalable Cloud Communications platform, which supports a unified approach to calling, faxing, mobile support, advanced collaboration features, and more.
For instance, the advanced presence management capabilities of the Star2Star system have revolutionized how the company handles calls. “StarScope 2 is critical. All the receptionists and cashiers, service and sales coordinators, anyone who answers the phones depends on it,” explained Brandon. “We use Call Park specifically a lot. We can keep track of everyone on the system, which was impossible to do before. It’s really become a necessity, and it works really well. If we didn’t have that anymore, the staff would go nuts.”
Other productivity-boosters include Star2Star’s mobile app, StarPhone for iPhone, StarFax Personal, ring groups and call queues.
“It’s easy to configure ring groups and call queues, and very flexible as to different things you can do. I’ve got all sorts of craziness with rollovers and groups,” Cox said. “[Setting up ring groups and call queues] is much easier than any other system I’ve ever worked with.” The system is also configured for Find Me - Follow Me, so incoming calls ring to both cell phone and desk phone simultaneously.
“We hit them both at the same time. That’s really nice, and it works really well. It fits the environment here,” Brandon concluded.
AccuVoIP Services. Contact http://www.accuvoipservices.com/ at 262-649-1097 They’ll analyze your current situation and expenses and show you exactly how much money you’ll save with Star2Star. In most cases, you can even keep your old phone numbers.
Like most dealerships, Gurley has a main office on each lot along with a service department, and runs its business every day, meaning that salespeople and repair persons are often “on-call.” The customer service operation relies on queuing and scheduling appointments and must also juggle walk-ins, or “drive-ins” as the case may be. Because it needs to send out loan documents and insurance papers, reliable faxing is a must for regulatory compliance.
Until recently, Brandon was struggling along with an analog telephone system that provided very limited, basic functionality. Workers relied on multiple calls and ad-hoc communications to make sure everyone was where they were supposed to be, and there was no appropriate way to track things other than by spreadsheets and manual processes. It was complex, messy, and inefficient.
Even worse, the system was also starting to break down, making maintenance a big headache for the company.
“One night we stayed out here until four in the morning fixing the problem,” said Brandon, Gurley's sales and service manager and IT manager. “We had no choice. Our phones are our lifeblood.”
AccuVoIP Services, Brandon's trusted communications vendor for 3 years, recommended making the switch to Star2Star’s Scalable Cloud Communications platform, which supports a unified approach to calling, faxing, mobile support, advanced collaboration features, and more.
For instance, the advanced presence management capabilities of the Star2Star system have revolutionized how the company handles calls. “StarScope 2 is critical. All the receptionists and cashiers, service and sales coordinators, anyone who answers the phones depends on it,” explained Brandon. “We use Call Park specifically a lot. We can keep track of everyone on the system, which was impossible to do before. It’s really become a necessity, and it works really well. If we didn’t have that anymore, the staff would go nuts.”
Other productivity-boosters include Star2Star’s mobile app, StarPhone for iPhone, StarFax Personal, ring groups and call queues.
“It’s easy to configure ring groups and call queues, and very flexible as to different things you can do. I’ve got all sorts of craziness with rollovers and groups,” Cox said. “[Setting up ring groups and call queues] is much easier than any other system I’ve ever worked with.” The system is also configured for Find Me - Follow Me, so incoming calls ring to both cell phone and desk phone simultaneously.
“We hit them both at the same time. That’s really nice, and it works really well. It fits the environment here,” Brandon concluded.
AccuVoIP Services. Contact http://www.accuvoipservices.com/ at 262-649-1097 They’ll analyze your current situation and expenses and show you exactly how much money you’ll save with Star2Star. In most cases, you can even keep your old phone numbers.
Wednesday, September 30, 2015
New VoIP Phone Systems are A Critical Workflow Enabler For The Always-On Generation
Despite the good reliability record of the U.S. power grid, a catastrophic power outage is not out of the question. Some experts have expressed surprise that such an event hasn’t occurred yet. Most outages are the direct result of weather-related events restricted to certain regions—such as Hurricane Sandy in the Northeast—but that doesn’t mean a disaster is not within striking distance of your business.
Much has been made of the so-called Millennial demographic—those young people born between 1980 and 2000. The 25 and under cohort is just entering the workforce, but they will likely change telecom as we know it—paving the way for ubiquitous unified communications (UC) that rely on mobility as a key pillar.
Millennials will make up 50% of the workforce in less than five years, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. By 2030, they’ll represent three-quarters of it. And UC will be a critical workflow enabler for this always-on generation.
Having grown up with access to connected, always-on everything, including mobile phones, instant messaging and text messaging, entertainment, and more, Millennials expect a seamless communications and content experience as they migrate across devices. And these expectations must be integrated into the workplace to enable optimized productivity.
Mobility will be a big part of this. The latest Gallup poll shows that smartphones are our near-constant companions. A full 81 percent of smartphone users say they keep their phone near them "almost all the time during waking hours." Smartphone attachment peaks in younger demographics. The survey found that more than 7 in 10 young smartphone owners check their device a few times an hour or more often, including 22 percent who admit to checking it every few minutes.
That contrasts with the 21 percent of smartphone owners who are aged 65 and older who check it a few times an hour or more, with a miniscule 3 percent of that older age group checking it every few minutes.
The use of mobility as an enabling reality for business functions of all kinds—be it checking email or downloading critical files with sensitive company information—will only grow in importance as this group takes its place in the workforce.
Most of all, younger employees expect to have the ability to work flexibly—and from pretty much any location. Businesses that fail to recognize this risk losing employees and missing out on new talent. At the same time, organizations need a way to maintain IT control, run analytics on employee workflow, and enforce corporate policy and security approaches.
UC is the perfect path to developing this kind of functionality, which can be embraced by both the employer and the employee.
The opportunity for channel partners is to be able to help organizations large and small to successfully migrate to modern UC solutions that incorporate mobility and a range of ancillary applications. It’s a shift from the traditional telecom infrastructure approach, to be sure—but the sooner businesses understand that such a change is inevitable, the better position they’ll be in to maintain their competitive position when it comes to hiring the best and brightest in their fields.
AccuVoIP Services. Contact http://www.accuvoipservices.com/ at 262-649-1097 They’ll analyze your current situation and expenses and show you exactly how much money you’ll save with Star2Star. In most cases, you can even keep your old phone numbers.
Much has been made of the so-called Millennial demographic—those young people born between 1980 and 2000. The 25 and under cohort is just entering the workforce, but they will likely change telecom as we know it—paving the way for ubiquitous unified communications (UC) that rely on mobility as a key pillar.
Millennials will make up 50% of the workforce in less than five years, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. By 2030, they’ll represent three-quarters of it. And UC will be a critical workflow enabler for this always-on generation.
Having grown up with access to connected, always-on everything, including mobile phones, instant messaging and text messaging, entertainment, and more, Millennials expect a seamless communications and content experience as they migrate across devices. And these expectations must be integrated into the workplace to enable optimized productivity.
Mobility will be a big part of this. The latest Gallup poll shows that smartphones are our near-constant companions. A full 81 percent of smartphone users say they keep their phone near them "almost all the time during waking hours." Smartphone attachment peaks in younger demographics. The survey found that more than 7 in 10 young smartphone owners check their device a few times an hour or more often, including 22 percent who admit to checking it every few minutes.
That contrasts with the 21 percent of smartphone owners who are aged 65 and older who check it a few times an hour or more, with a miniscule 3 percent of that older age group checking it every few minutes.
The use of mobility as an enabling reality for business functions of all kinds—be it checking email or downloading critical files with sensitive company information—will only grow in importance as this group takes its place in the workforce.
Most of all, younger employees expect to have the ability to work flexibly—and from pretty much any location. Businesses that fail to recognize this risk losing employees and missing out on new talent. At the same time, organizations need a way to maintain IT control, run analytics on employee workflow, and enforce corporate policy and security approaches.
UC is the perfect path to developing this kind of functionality, which can be embraced by both the employer and the employee.
The opportunity for channel partners is to be able to help organizations large and small to successfully migrate to modern UC solutions that incorporate mobility and a range of ancillary applications. It’s a shift from the traditional telecom infrastructure approach, to be sure—but the sooner businesses understand that such a change is inevitable, the better position they’ll be in to maintain their competitive position when it comes to hiring the best and brightest in their fields.
AccuVoIP Services. Contact http://www.accuvoipservices.com/ at 262-649-1097 They’ll analyze your current situation and expenses and show you exactly how much money you’ll save with Star2Star. In most cases, you can even keep your old phone numbers.
Tuesday, September 29, 2015
Does Your VoIP Phone System Keep Phone Calls Coming in During Temporary Outages?
CLICK ME!!!!
Despite the good reliability record of the U.S. power grid, a catastrophic power outage is not out of the question. Some experts have expressed surprise that such an event hasn’t occurred yet. Most outages are the direct result of weather-related events restricted to certain regions—such as Hurricane Sandy in the Northeast—but that doesn’t mean a disaster is not within striking distance of your business.
Our country’s reliance for electricity is supported by an energy grid comprised of 160,000 high-voltage lines, 5 million miles of distribution lines, thousands of generators and transformers, and tens of thousands of additional pieces of equipment. According to the Wall Street Journal, a devastating power outage is not just possible, it’s likely.
Losing the capability to communicate with your customers would be a serious blow to your business, both in terms of reputation and dollars. How do you safeguard your business against the possible onslaught of damage that downtime represents—especially when weather is just the tip of the iceberg (think terrorism and hackers)?
You need to make every reasonable attempt to ensure that your organization’s communications system never becomes compromised. To do that, you will need to start evaluating systems that boast redundancy and high reliability, such as Star2Star’s unified communications (UC) solution.
Scalable cloud communications from Star2Star guarantee 99.999 percent uptime reliability for your business calls, providing 100 percent uptime since 2011. With the Star2Star system, you receive not only remarkable reliability but a comprehensive package of cloud-based UC features including voice, video, messaging, conferencing, fax, presence management, and more.
Because the system combines both on-premises equipment and a suite of cloud-based services, it resolves the respective “problems” of each approach. For example, on-premises hardware invites potential service downtime as it is susceptible to even local power disruptions. Completely hosted communication solutions encompass a lack of control for the organization.
Star2Star’s on-premises hardware— the StarBox Cloud Connection Manager—takes the place of a typical edge device to provide our quality of service and call control. It connects over the Internet to Star2Star’s nationwide network of call routing nodes and data centers, constantly amassing data about the operation of each node and the Internet traffic surrounding each node, to determine best options for call routing—resulting in optimal audio on every call.
Our cloud-based services are hosted at data centers in highly secure facilities with redundant power, redundant Internet connectivity, and strict security measures. Monitoring goes on nonstop, so that the services can adjust to variable conditions. If a problem arises, you will be notified promptly. The help desk operates 24/7/365.
Here are the additional ways Star2Star works to keep your business connected:
Switching to Star2Star is easy. Just contact your Star2Star re-seller at AccuVoIP Services. Contact http://www.accuvoipservices.com/ at 262-649-1097 They’ll analyze your current situation and expenses and show you exactly how much money you’ll save with Star2Star. In most cases, you can even keep your old phone numbers.
Despite the good reliability record of the U.S. power grid, a catastrophic power outage is not out of the question. Some experts have expressed surprise that such an event hasn’t occurred yet. Most outages are the direct result of weather-related events restricted to certain regions—such as Hurricane Sandy in the Northeast—but that doesn’t mean a disaster is not within striking distance of your business.
Our country’s reliance for electricity is supported by an energy grid comprised of 160,000 high-voltage lines, 5 million miles of distribution lines, thousands of generators and transformers, and tens of thousands of additional pieces of equipment. According to the Wall Street Journal, a devastating power outage is not just possible, it’s likely.
Losing the capability to communicate with your customers would be a serious blow to your business, both in terms of reputation and dollars. How do you safeguard your business against the possible onslaught of damage that downtime represents—especially when weather is just the tip of the iceberg (think terrorism and hackers)?
You need to make every reasonable attempt to ensure that your organization’s communications system never becomes compromised. To do that, you will need to start evaluating systems that boast redundancy and high reliability, such as Star2Star’s unified communications (UC) solution.
Scalable cloud communications from Star2Star guarantee 99.999 percent uptime reliability for your business calls, providing 100 percent uptime since 2011. With the Star2Star system, you receive not only remarkable reliability but a comprehensive package of cloud-based UC features including voice, video, messaging, conferencing, fax, presence management, and more.
Because the system combines both on-premises equipment and a suite of cloud-based services, it resolves the respective “problems” of each approach. For example, on-premises hardware invites potential service downtime as it is susceptible to even local power disruptions. Completely hosted communication solutions encompass a lack of control for the organization.
Star2Star’s on-premises hardware— the StarBox Cloud Connection Manager—takes the place of a typical edge device to provide our quality of service and call control. It connects over the Internet to Star2Star’s nationwide network of call routing nodes and data centers, constantly amassing data about the operation of each node and the Internet traffic surrounding each node, to determine best options for call routing—resulting in optimal audio on every call.
Our cloud-based services are hosted at data centers in highly secure facilities with redundant power, redundant Internet connectivity, and strict security measures. Monitoring goes on nonstop, so that the services can adjust to variable conditions. If a problem arises, you will be notified promptly. The help desk operates 24/7/365.
Here are the additional ways Star2Star works to keep your business connected:
- Failover: In the event that a problem is detected with a circuit, services are set up to switch among multiple Internet circuits at your facility. Redundant, high-speed fiber connections to the Internet are distributed among eight major points of presence and two data centers to provide stellar continuity.
- Next-day replacement parts: The StarBox CCM operating software runs via flash or solid-state disk memory without any moving parts, so unexpected system failure from wear and tear is prevented. At no additional cost, you can have any broken component replaced, including phones, within 24 hours.
- Disaster recovery: Regardless of the reason, if you experience an outage, the StarRecovery system will instantly detect the problem and automatically take over. Your calls will be rerouted to designated employee cell phones, landlines, or other office locations.
Switching to Star2Star is easy. Just contact your Star2Star re-seller at AccuVoIP Services. Contact http://www.accuvoipservices.com/ at 262-649-1097 They’ll analyze your current situation and expenses and show you exactly how much money you’ll save with Star2Star. In most cases, you can even keep your old phone numbers.
Why Larger Enterprises Are Embracing the Cloud and Converged Unified Communications
As businesses grow and expand domestically and internationally, they need a sophisticated way to manage their communications and collaboration. Cloud-based unified communications provides big savings in calling costs—important for large-scale enterprises—and provides geographic flexibility while boosting business productivity. What’s not to like? The global unified communication market is expected to reach $75.81 billion by 2020,according to Grand View Research. Enterprises emerged as the largest application segment for UC in 2013--2014 and are expected to continue dominating the market over the next six years as they continue to deploy the necessary IP infrastructure to support unified communications. Grand View said that the increase in mobile workforce as well as enterprise mobility is expected to favorably impact the global market over the next six years as growing demand and proliferation of smartphones continues. In fact, increasing adoption of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) initiatives by large enterprises is a driving force for the industry. There are vertical-specific applications to consider (i.e., the adoption of an effective UC system in the government sector aids in operational continuity, emergency response, and situational awareness), but Marlin Financing points out that UC’s ability to unite communications platforms around the office can boost productivity and improve customer and partner satisfaction for any large enterprise, especially those that may have multiple locations and distributed departments. Consider just one small example: the office voicemail that goes without being listened to for hours, because no one is in the room to see the blinking red light on the desk phone. “Maybe the caller reached out after business hours. Maybe the call came in while you were in a meeting,” Marlin said in a recent report. “Doesn't matter. Whatever opportunity might have come from that phone call might be irretrievable, all because a busy schedule crowded your view of your answering machine.” VoIP on the other hand can offer a Find Me/Follow Me function or alerts on one’s smartphone or tablet when a message comes in. According to an annual trends report from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byer, people check their smartphones around 150 times every single day. “Therefore, voicemail messages uploaded to an office email account synced to a smartphone have a greater chance of getting noticed,” Marlin said. From that simple example, it’s easy to see how Web conferencing, messaging, telephony, and other communications avenues working together to optimize operations is a message that makes sense for boosting productivity. At Star2Star, scalability and flexibility are key differentiators for our UC solution.
Switching to Star2Star is easy. Just contact your Star2Star re-seller at AccuVoIP Services. Contact http://www.accuvoipservices.com/ at 262-649-1097 They’ll analyze your current situation and expenses and show you exactly how much money you’ll save with Star2Star. In most cases, you can even keep your old phone numbers.
Switching to Star2Star is easy. Just contact your Star2Star re-seller at AccuVoIP Services. Contact http://www.accuvoipservices.com/ at 262-649-1097 They’ll analyze your current situation and expenses and show you exactly how much money you’ll save with Star2Star. In most cases, you can even keep your old phone numbers.
Monday, September 28, 2015
Unified Communication: The Future Foundations for Customer Service
Contact center operations are rapidly moving into the cloud as a growing number of businesses embrace the flexibility and simplicity of subscription-based services. For channel partners, this presents a big opportunity to talk up unified communications as a way to facilitate seamless agent communication and streamlined cross-department collaboration to better serve customers.
According to Frost & Sullivan, the cloud contact center market is growing at almost twice the rate of premises-based contact center systems (11.6 percent versus 6.1 percent). Moving a contact center to the cloud has a number of benefits in terms of flexibility. It allows customer service agents and supervisors to be in any location, and allows companies to scale up to manage peak or seasonal demands—a huge benefit in the retail and entertainment sector. Additionally, cloud-based contact centers support business continuity and remote agent strategies.
However, taking full advantage of that flexibility requires an underlying collaborative approach that makes communication seamless between agents and departments, with a centralized way to link distributed agents and resources. Functions such as seamless call transfer, the option to escalate chats to calls, mobile support, and more become crucial.
Adopting UC in a contact center environment can directly address some top pain points for customers. A January 2015 customer experience survey examined consumer perceptions of service while making online or phone purchases over $25 in the previous six months. The study, from Harris Interactive, found that consumers most want agent service continuity and choice of channels for follow-up communications.
The study found that the stakes are high. It revealed that 86 percent would be very likely to switch to another company in the future after a bad customer service experience.
Star2Star can enable the contact center with a UC platform that supports voice, video, presence, chat, and analytics between agents and across departments and geographies—thereby enabling organizations to gain a differentiating level of customer service.
StarCenter is a complete inbound call center only available from Star2Star that keeps users on the cutting edge. StarCenter makes it easy to add and administer queues and agents with an easy-to-use web-based interface. Star2Star delivers customizable features such as call routing, management and reporting.
StarCenter includes StarView, which gives call center managers the power to turn raw call center data into usable information that helps propel a business forward.
Make the Switch to Star2Star Switching to Star2Star is easy. Just contact your Star2Star re-seller at AccuVoIP Services. Contact http://www.accuvoipservices.com/ at 262-649-1097 They’ll analyze your current situation and expenses and show you exactly how much money you’ll save with Star2Star. In most cases, you can even keep your old phone numbers.
According to Frost & Sullivan, the cloud contact center market is growing at almost twice the rate of premises-based contact center systems (11.6 percent versus 6.1 percent). Moving a contact center to the cloud has a number of benefits in terms of flexibility. It allows customer service agents and supervisors to be in any location, and allows companies to scale up to manage peak or seasonal demands—a huge benefit in the retail and entertainment sector. Additionally, cloud-based contact centers support business continuity and remote agent strategies.
However, taking full advantage of that flexibility requires an underlying collaborative approach that makes communication seamless between agents and departments, with a centralized way to link distributed agents and resources. Functions such as seamless call transfer, the option to escalate chats to calls, mobile support, and more become crucial.
Adopting UC in a contact center environment can directly address some top pain points for customers. A January 2015 customer experience survey examined consumer perceptions of service while making online or phone purchases over $25 in the previous six months. The study, from Harris Interactive, found that consumers most want agent service continuity and choice of channels for follow-up communications.
The study found that the stakes are high. It revealed that 86 percent would be very likely to switch to another company in the future after a bad customer service experience.
Star2Star can enable the contact center with a UC platform that supports voice, video, presence, chat, and analytics between agents and across departments and geographies—thereby enabling organizations to gain a differentiating level of customer service.
StarCenter is a complete inbound call center only available from Star2Star that keeps users on the cutting edge. StarCenter makes it easy to add and administer queues and agents with an easy-to-use web-based interface. Star2Star delivers customizable features such as call routing, management and reporting.
StarCenter includes StarView, which gives call center managers the power to turn raw call center data into usable information that helps propel a business forward.
Make the Switch to Star2Star Switching to Star2Star is easy. Just contact your Star2Star re-seller at AccuVoIP Services. Contact http://www.accuvoipservices.com/ at 262-649-1097 They’ll analyze your current situation and expenses and show you exactly how much money you’ll save with Star2Star. In most cases, you can even keep your old phone numbers.
Friday, September 25, 2015
Scalable VoIP Communications Keep Well Care Home Heath in Tip-top Shape
Imagine: You’re a healthcare agent, caring for an elderly patient in the comfort of his or her own home. Suddenly, a situation arises where you need assistance from a co-worker back at the office. To your dismay, the office line is continuously busy and you don’t have access to your colleagues’ personal phone numbers. A situation like this could be detrimental. For this reason, it’s of the utmost importance for those in the healthcare industry to have access to the most advanced methods of communication that today’ s phone technology has to offer. If the employee in this hypothetical situation had access to a suite of unified communications (UC) features on his or her personal device that was directly connected to an office phone line, he or she could have seen the availabilities of colleagues to avoid calling lines that were unavailable. Additionally, the distressed employee could have also turned to a wealth of real-time communication options—like instant chat, for instance—to find other ways to connect with someone immediately. Thankfully, Star2Star was able to help a real home healthcare agency prevent such situations by implementing a best-in-class scalable cloud communications solution. Well Care Home Health, a Wilmington, North Carolina-based healthcare agency realized that in its line of business, communication can make all the difference - especially when a patient’s well-being is on the line. Their legacy phone system wasn’t providing enough support. With eight major locations and a total of 5,000 employees spanning the Southeastern section of the state, the agency realized its traditional PSTN-based system was failing to provide the advanced communications technology they needed. Well Care turned to Star2Star to solve its communication shortcomings. The first order of business was to unify all of their business locations into one account, so that employees from every office could not only communicate internally more easily, but also so that employees from one location could manage calls from another office location. Centralizing communications means that no call will ever go unanswered and no customer will endure a lengthy hold time, as all hands are on deck and can help manage the queues even in disparate locations. Additionally, Star2Star’s robust suite of UC features enables Well Care to communicate internally at much higher efficiency. Most notably the agency takes advantage of the system’s conference calling capabilities, which allow employees to communicate all at once no matter if they are working in the office or out in the field. Another benefit afforded from Well Care’s transition to a scalable cloud communication solution was its mobile capability. Now, agents in the field can stay in touch with colleagues and accept forwarded calls to their personal device when they are not in the office. In this way, agents can provide better serve their patients by always being available at one phone number via the Find Me/Follow Me feature which transfers call made to an office phone to a mobile phone. What’s more, the Star2Star cloud-based communications system makes scaling the phone system to new locations much simpler for the agency. With a traditional PBX, adding new phone lines to serve as a bridge between locations presented a huge cost center as well as unnecessary downtime. Now, if the agency wishes to expand to new locations it can simply do so internally by setting up the StarBox Cloud Connection Manager. Once that is up and running it will automatically connect with the other offices. These benefits are just a snapshot of what Well Care Home Health gained from trading their legacy phone system for a Star2Star scalable unified communication solution. To find out more about how the healthcare agency augmented its business communication read the full case study!
Switching to Star2Star is easy. Just contact your Star2Star re-seller at AccuVoIP Services. Contact http://www.accuvoipservices.com/ at 262-649-1097 They’ll analyze your current situation and expenses and show you exactly how much money you’ll save with Star2Star. In most cases, you can even keep your old phone numbers.
Switching to Star2Star is easy. Just contact your Star2Star re-seller at AccuVoIP Services. Contact http://www.accuvoipservices.com/ at 262-649-1097 They’ll analyze your current situation and expenses and show you exactly how much money you’ll save with Star2Star. In most cases, you can even keep your old phone numbers.
Thursday, July 16, 2015
Why Local VoIP Telecom Vendors Should Offer Unified Communications
For phone and Internet carriers, offering a unified communications (UC) solution was considered optional as recently as five years ago. These days, however, businesses are increasingly expecting to implement UC and may view it as a prerequisite of using the services of a specific provider. Research released by MDS noted that 75 percent of IT and telecom decision-makers were actively seeking to move towards a UC infrastructure sometime in the imminent future.
The advantages of UC technology—the convergence of multiple communication channels into a single platform—are well documented. UC offers a wide variety of features that streamline communications, reduce costs, increase mobility, provide greater flexibility, and drive higher levels of productivity. Looking at these benefits, more and more IT personnel are pushing their companies and clients to adopt UC. As end users begin to see UC’s features as crucial to growing or sustaining their businesses, it will be incumbent upon carriers to provide the services.
Considering a new generation of employees is joining the workforce and moving up the corporate ladder, the expectation that service providers will offer UC is almost certain to grow stronger. With the market projected to grow to upwards of $16.9 billion by 2018, not meeting that expectation will almost certainly translate to lost revenue. Simply put, carriers who do not offer UC are going to find themselves in an increasingly uncomfortable position in the near future. All businesses are familiar with supply and demand, and if operators need to supply what IT managers demand.
Make the Switch to Star2Star
Switching to Star2Star is easy. Just contact your Star2Star re-seller at AccuVoIP Services. Contact http://www.accuvoipservices.com/ at 262-649-1097 They’ll analyze your current situation and expenses and show you exactly how much money you’ll save with Star2Star. In most cases, you can even keep your old phone numbers.
Does Your VoIP Contact Center Have Future-Proof Technology?
If you want your contact center to remain competitive for years to come, you’ll need to incorporate best-in-class technologies to improve agent performance and maintain quality. Without implementing leading-edge contact center solution features (that both your agents and supervisors can leverage), you may find yourself lagging behind your rivals:
For agents:
Real-time displays: Agents can meet customer needs more effectively when they have access to a wealth of customer data (i.e. company name and corporate position) in a real-time desktop display. With this capability, agents receive caller information immediately, as well as snapshots of critical metrics to monitor their own performance.
Flexible queuing configuration: This feature enhances the agent-caller interaction by ensuring customers are directed to the appropriate agent in the most informed and direct manner possible. Once those queues are created, they can be easily modified and updated to ensure that agent performance continues to be high. Multiple choices enable callers to select one of several possible actions while waiting for an agent, such as going to voicemail. Different announcement types (e.g., estimated wait time) keep callers informed of their status.
Advanced ring strategies: Incoming calls can be routed to the most appropriate agent based on several ring strategies. Rings can range from easy circular and non-prioritized round robin call distribution to skills-based routing, which targets specific agents, typically leaving agents with low skill levels for last. Another commonly deployed ring strategy is one in which calls are routed to agents based on their skill ranking. If a designated agent is busy, the system will hold the caller in the queue for a specified time period before sending the call to the next-highest-skilled agent.
For supervisors:
Agent Barge, Monitor, and Whisper: These administrative features allow supervisors to monitor, coach, and train agents. Monitor allows superiors to silently listen to calls. Whisper allows superiors to relay pertinent information to the agent handling the call without the caller knowing. Barge allows superiors to enter the call and take over the interaction.
In-depth reporting: With robust call center solutions, supervisors can access detailed call reports that include queue and agent summaries, immediately upon call completion. They can leverage historical summary reports that simplify collected data into daily, weekly, or monthly trends, as well as drill down to the underlying queue, agent, and call detail. These reports allow supervisors to provide timely feedback and support, boost service quality, and cultivate customer loyalty.
Key Performance Indicators (KPI) dashboard: With this feature, managers gain real-time visibility into the most important contact center metrics such as calls answered, calls abandoned, and average and longest wait times, generating quick insights into these key metrics. Furthermore, supervisors can be alerted when a contact center event exceeds pre-set limits, allowing for rapid resolution.
To stay competitive with today’s most-customer-oriented brands, consider deploying these technologies into your contact center. Customer satisfaction impacts your bottom line because it costs far less to retain an existing client than it does to attract a new client. According to an article in CMO, to improve sales and ROI, business leaders should focus on customers already in hand.
In tandem with our Star2Star communications platform, our StarCenter full-featured contact center offers advanced functionality in an easy-to-manage system. Moreover, StarView for StarCenter gives call center managers access to real-time and historical data reports on call center metrics. Click here for more information on how AccuVoIP Services and Star2Star can enhance your business’s communications system.
Make the Switch to Star2Star
Switching to Star2Star is easy. Just contact your Star2Star re-seller at AccuVoIP Services. Contact http://www.accuvoipservices.com/ at 262-649-1097 They’ll analyze your current situation and expenses and show you exactly how much money you’ll save with Star2Star. In most cases, you can even keep your old phone numbers.
Switching to Star2Star is easy. Just contact your Star2Star re-seller at AccuVoIP Services. Contact http://www.accuvoipservices.com/ at 262-649-1097 They’ll analyze your current situation and expenses and show you exactly how much money you’ll save with Star2Star. In most cases, you can even keep your old phone numbers.
Would You Do Business with You?
When evaluating the customer experience your business presents to customers, you should try adopting their perspective. Think about your own experiences with customer service representatives, both negative and positive.
According to the “2012 Global Customer Service Barometer” report compiled by American Express, 26 percent of consumers have been transferred from agent to agent without any resolution of their problem. The same report found that consumers are twice as likely to share a bad customer service experience as they are to talk about a positive one.
These statistics underscore the importance of quality customer service. Consumers expect to have instant access to your contact center over whatever channel is most convenient to them. If your company is not as accommodating as it could be, a unified communications (UC) solution may be right for you.
UC allows your business to merge all of your existing communications technology into one system, and take advantage of value-added features including text chat, conferencing, presence management, advanced queuing and ring group options, and more. With UC, your customers can chat live with a representative via instant messaging from work during their lunch break or conference with an agent from a laptop while waiting to board a flight. The possibilities are nearly endless.
Furthermore, your business can utilize features such as auto attendants to ensure you are serving customers quickly and professionally even when a live attendant is not available. Auto attendants give you the flexibility to configure consistent, helpful responses to consumer inquiries and avoid subjecting them to lengthy wait times.
Other features enabled by UC keep you in contact with customers as well. Advanced disaster prevention and recovery protections will automatically forward calls to remote locations or even employee cell phones if your offices are inaccessible. Bursting lines will automatically add lines on the fly when all current lines are in use, preventing customers from ever hearing a busy signal.
To avoid falling behind the times—and your competition—consider investigating the ways UC can help you improve your customers’ experience. If you would like to know more about the World’s Most Scalable Cloud Communications Solution, find out more about Star2Star Communications here.
Make the Switch to Star2Star
Switching to Star2Star is easy. Just contact your Star2Star re-seller at AccuVoIP Services. Contact http://www.accuvoipservices.com/ at 262-649-1097 They’ll analyze your current situation and expenses and show you exactly how much money you’ll save with Star2Star. In most cases, you can even keep your old phone numbers.
Switching to Star2Star is easy. Just contact your Star2Star re-seller at AccuVoIP Services. Contact http://www.accuvoipservices.com/ at 262-649-1097 They’ll analyze your current situation and expenses and show you exactly how much money you’ll save with Star2Star. In most cases, you can even keep your old phone numbers.
Understanding VoIP and Unified Communication Scalability
The term “scalability” is tossed around the communications and information technology markets quite a bit these days, but what exactly does scalability mean for business managers? Why does it make sense for your business to consider your short and long-term scalability needs?
As a manager, you must respond to customers’ increasing demands to provide high quality services or products to growing a market.
Broadly speaking, scalability refers to the capability of a business to increase the size of part or all of their operations without disruption.
A Scalable Cloud Communications Solution offers multiple platforms in one unified system, allowing businesses to chat, share information, and collaborate in real-time. From storing information in a cloud-based system to using auto-attendants to provide feedback about products and services, a unified communications solution helps to cut costs, simplify operations, and increase productivity.
To integrate scalable, real-time communications within your environment, ask yourself the following questions to optimize your business:
- How can I pay less for a product or service without sacrificing quality?
- Which of my business’ productivity tools could be offered in the cloud?
- Are there any business tasks that could be performed using mobile tools?
- Will the proposed solution meet all of my organization’s diverse needs?
- Can I integrate the new solution into existing IT infrastructure?
Make the Switch to Star2Star
Switching to Star2Star is easy. Just contact your Star2Star re-seller at AccuVoIP Services. Contact http://www.accuvoipservices.com/ at 262-649-1097 They’ll analyze your current situation and expenses and show you exactly how much money you’ll save with Star2Star. In most cases, you can even keep your old phone numbers.
Switching to Star2Star is easy. Just contact your Star2Star re-seller at AccuVoIP Services. Contact http://www.accuvoipservices.com/ at 262-649-1097 They’ll analyze your current situation and expenses and show you exactly how much money you’ll save with Star2Star. In most cases, you can even keep your old phone numbers.
Wednesday, July 8, 2015
Remote Conferencing, the New Moving Office
As discussed in our previous blog post, we understand the importance of remote conferencing in the work place. Since most companies are working nationally as well as internationally, it is important to be able to fully connect with your employees and clients. When dealing with such high distance between two parties, there can be a major disconnect of communication which can spiral downward into various scenarios that can negatively affect your business.
Solve that problem with remote conferencing! Not only will you receive the great product of our internet remote conferencing services, you will also be able to stream in confidence knowing that your services are backed by our presence management and with our call support team. We want to ensure that you are using nothing but quality services for all of your business needs. We understand how crucial proper communication to be any business and we strive to perfect our services and products.
Our video remote conferencing is easy to use! Our services are able to connect 12 users with real-time StarVideo conference with audio. Have more than 12 users? No problem! They can connect using the audio only so that all members are included! There are so many unique features included there is no reason why this wouldn’t be the right communication solution for you!
We Are More Than Our VOIP Phone Systems!
At AccuVoIP Services, we are known for our internet phone systems and while we provide exceptional services for our phones, we also provide numerous other communications services. We pride ourselves in being able to deliver an entire suite of voice and unified communications solutions throughout various platforms. Our company listens to your concerns and questions we are constantly bettering our communication solutions to be able to provide you with flexible, intelligent, and easy systems to keep your business running without any bumps!
We improve your experience with our call center with an employee ready to answer any questions or problems that occurred. We also are able to provide you with StarConferencing which allows for the ultimate flexibly in any company. This tool is great for you to be able to conference in clients or employees who are working remotely; there is no reason to lose any business hours because of location issues! Tied directly into this service, is also our mobile feature which grants access with our Star2Star telephone system! So even if you are or your team is traveling, you will not miss a beat in the work place.
Some of our additional communication solutions include video conferencing. This solution would be ideal in a work place that conducts interviews; you are able to effetely interview a potential client or employee. Not only with a great product but also backed with our top notch service. Learn about all of our VOIP phone systems and services at today!
We improve your experience with our call center with an employee ready to answer any questions or problems that occurred. We also are able to provide you with StarConferencing which allows for the ultimate flexibly in any company. This tool is great for you to be able to conference in clients or employees who are working remotely; there is no reason to lose any business hours because of location issues! Tied directly into this service, is also our mobile feature which grants access with our Star2Star telephone system! So even if you are or your team is traveling, you will not miss a beat in the work place.
Some of our additional communication solutions include video conferencing. This solution would be ideal in a work place that conducts interviews; you are able to effetely interview a potential client or employee. Not only with a great product but also backed with our top notch service. Learn about all of our VOIP phone systems and services at today!
When You Would Need VOIP Phone Systems
Of course there are basic things you need to have to be a full service office, and no we are not talking about staplers and tape dispensers, we are talking about the basic form of communication; a phone. At AccuVoIP Services we take phone systems very seriously; we understand the importance that proper communication can provide. Our VOIP phone systems are going to be that barrier your company needs to have guaranteed reliability with any type of meeting or conference you are holding.
Those events are vital to your company and you should not miss out on lost information because of missed communication. Connect you with your clients in a clear line communications no matter if you are going through a blackout or they are going through a disaster, business does not stop and neither do we! Contact us today to learn more about our VOIP phone systems!
Monday, July 6, 2015
Partner With AccuVoIP & Star2Star, We’re Always Watching Your Back
What can you do with Star2Star? • Boost productivity by uniting satellite offices, mobile users, and work-at-home employees into a single, unified system with a single dialing plan. http://stwb.co/splcee
Many unified communications (UC) providers promise high reliability without revealing how they provide it or explaining exactly how they guarantee a high quality of service. Star2Star Communications, however, is always happy to explain how we protect call quality at all times because we are confident that our methods speak for themselves.
StarWatch Continuous Monitoring proactively checks on Star2Star customer locations every few minutes, so someone is always keeping an eye on your voice service. If two checkup cycles pass without a response from the system for any reason (for example a power or Internet outage), the customer and the Star2Star partner who provided the system are alerted immediately. This notification is called StarNotify. We monitor the quality of every call made between customer phone systems and our data center 24/7/365, and our technology automatically adjusts to changing conditions If a problem arises.
Star2Star’s 99.999% uptime reliability guarantee is also based on protections like:
- Redundant Internet connections that allow us to automatically switch between multiple Internet circuits at your location if our monitoring detects a problem
- Partnerships with multiple traditional telephone carriers to send your calls over the traditional phone network when necessary
- StarRecovery disaster avoidance and recovery, which immediately takes over as your phone system when an outage occurs
- Guaranteed next-day replacement of all Star2Star-provided parts
- Our StarBox Cloud Connection Manager is built on a solid-state platform with no easily-breakable moving parts
The bottom line is that Star2Star is committed to providing unfailing reliability to customers and has the résumé to back up that claim. Our system hasn’t gone down for even a second since 2011, a record our competition simply can’t match. Additionally, Star2Star’s unique Blended Architecture was recently honored with Frost & Sullivan’s Product Differentiation Excellence Award for the quality of our end-to-end UC solution. Want to learn more about how Star2Star is different from other UC providers? Click here to download our white paper “The Benefits of a Blended Architecture.”
Make the Switch to Star2Star
Switching to Star2Star is easy. Just contact your Star2Star re-seller at AccuVoIP Services. Contact http://www.accuvoipservices.com/ at 262-649-1097 They’ll analyze your current situation and expenses and show you exactly how much money you’ll save with Star2Star. In most cases, you can even keep your old phone numbers.
Switching to Star2Star is easy. Just contact your Star2Star re-seller at AccuVoIP Services. Contact http://www.accuvoipservices.com/ at 262-649-1097 They’ll analyze your current situation and expenses and show you exactly how much money you’ll save with Star2Star. In most cases, you can even keep your old phone numbers.
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