For us, the user experience from UC starts with the softphone, because it’s the face of the service. It’s a very important component and something we’re known for providing in the industry.
Impact of COVID-19 On Collaboration Messaging
Over the course of one weekend, the value proposition of collaboration went from it being about productivity to it being a necessity. That overnight necessity forced the hands of a lot of operations and IT workers to quickly get a solution in place.
I think we’ll continue to see a re-evaluation of a lot of these tools going forward.
For example, we need to have people work at home, so we need some kind of solution quickly that is collaborative services. Now we have this functional set of tools and users in our company have five to seven tools that don’t work well together and don’t interface well with our external customers or our existing infrastructure.
The phone is still really important. The mobile phone is your SS number of your personal life and your business number is the one way business contacts can get to you. They aren’t going to look you up on WhatsApp, Instagram or Facebook.
For us, adding on video conferencing and team messaging comes very easy to what we already offer. It’s an overlay to what these businesses already have in place, such as a PBX service from another vendor.
Over the next 6-12 months I think you’re going to see a switching and consolidation of tools going forward.”
Next Steps for the End User
I think it’s really important that the end user has upward communications into the IT operations team to let them know what their employees are using. The phone number is the central identity that people will use to contact that person. Having a solution that centers around that is very important.
We have a solution called Bria Teams which has done well because it centers everything around the phone number. So we have one application that works on mobile and desktop and then it also adds on the team messaging and video conferencing capability, all within one application.
I’ve heard that Bria Teams is easier to use where people have limited technical skills. We embrace web technologies that make it easy for external users to access Bria Teams. It is also super intuitive and very easy to use. But more importantly it is very reliable, particularly in the mobile space. The mobile experience is so important. Having an application that is reliable and reachable and doesn’t fail when you switch between WiFi and the mobile network is very important for the customer to have.
The CounterPath Strategy
At CounterPath we start with the mobile experience and work our way back to the desktop. With the mobile device, the environment is always changing.
Over the last 24 months we’ve focused heavily on the GTM strategy.
- We have a 100% digitally delivered online store where we sell two solutions – Bria Solo and Bria Teams. Customers get video conferencing, collaboration, team messaging, screensharing and the voice overlay to their PBX.
- Bria Enterprise – for VAD (value added distributors) and VAR (value added resellers), this solution is integrated into a partner portal and users can be provisioned and up and running very quickly. They get access to collaboration, team messaging, overlay with current call center solution. Channel partners often have open-source based deployments and they don’t have easy access to collaboration tools, so they have to layer on other services like Slack or Zoom which costs additional money and complicates the infrastructure.
- Service provider channel
Looking to the Future
What we are focused on is the horizontal space. The technology we’ve developed for the horizontal space fits nicely into the feature roadmap. Back in January we announced our relationship with Honeywell. Honeywell leverages us with rugged handhelds to sell to a variety of different verticals – retail, hospitality, travel.
In that market there is a big focus on push-to-talk communications, voice, messaging. Thinking of the future, lots of these could leverage UC – i.e. team messaging instead of push-to-talk, and video conferencing.
Sourced from: Counterpath. View the original article here.
