What is next for interaction management, integration and reporting?

The trends driving innovation in the customer interaction management, integration and reporting space

From Tollring’s perspective, innovation is being driven by a number of individual factors and wider trends, including:

  • Changes in the way that customers want to engage with businesses – the method they want, when they want, and with consistency.
  • A renewed focus on the customer experience as a differentiator means that reporting and interaction management has taken on greater importance.
  • The cloud, web and subscription economy, where SaaS is changing the way that businesses want to consume technology. Open web standards and APIs are driving the ability to integrate, and customers are beginning to expect this.
  • A lack of differentiation in the hosted UC marketplace – so the channel are looking for analytics to add value and an opportunity to get involved with businesses in a consultative manner.
  • Strides forward in big data and speech analytics mean that we can analyse more areas of customer interaction and in greater depth.

The importance of a partner-centric approach

At Tollring, we collaborate with partners on development, working together to identify the innovations that will have the greatest impact on their ability to sell more and increase margin. We aim for providers to achieve 50-100% more revenue per seat by adding Tollring to their portfolio.
New features are key to this. For example, omnichannel is a key area for development, which will be augmented with machine learning to improve the effectiveness of evaluating communications activity across a broad range of technologies.

At the same time, we are focused on helping partners to achieve ‘stickiness’ to reduce churn through Single Sign On capability and a strong API framework that gives greater product accessibility and integration with partner portals, and partner UC-based apps, software and phones.
For providers themselves, we’re giving them a greater understanding of their partners and end users via increased development of a partner management portal to facilitate new levels of billing capability, capacity planning and product utilisation visibility.

What innovations can the channel expect from Tollring over the near and long-term?

We are seeing further acceleration and accessibility of UC and customer analytics tools delivered via the Cloud. Accessibility is key; more sophisticated tools to monitor customer experience made available to the wider business audience. With Cloud AI services, we will see the unlocking of more and more valuable customer data and Tollring will leverage these services to further enhance our core products and services.

Tollring is well-positioned to take advantage of the omnichannel evolution, as specialists in business productivity tools with analytics at their heart. We work with service providers who are focusing on their UC propositions and as data becomes accessible to us, so will we be able to assist in delivering a more rounded UC proposition to customers. The powerful combination of enhanced UC propositions on VOIP networks and improved accessibility of machine-learning and AI tools makes for exciting developments.

Tollring will continue to work with significant industry players and is currently focusing on broadening the proposition to make iCall Suite analytics, call recording and fraud management available on significantly more cloud platforms globally. This will be achieved by working much more closely with CSP partners to embed Tollring’s services into their core offering. As a result, we have a very strong development strategy around our APIs and SSO paths. We see this as being a vital element to our growth plans.

How have your innovation regimes changed over time and what do these changes signify?

We are investing more heavily in R&D than ever before and expect to double resources and strengthen our global reach, ready to embrace change in the UC industry and evolve in line with technological advances.

The structure of our global team and the way we approach product development have been refined to cater for, and focus on, delivering scalable growth. Our strong development team generates a significant number of updates on a twice-yearly schedule, all designed to make our accessible product set deliver real value.

Managing innovation: the interaction between inspiration and strategic foresight

The simplest way that we have found to do this is to work closely with our partners to determine what is most important. That’s why we are leveraging AI and cloud services: it’s in line with customer demand, helping us and them to achieve greater insight than ever before.

The challenge with this is architecting our product for scale, which includes ensuring that varying customer requirements can be engineered in, in a controlled way. Simple, low overhead deployment is key. The creation and retention of our own IP across our broad product portfolio enables this rapid development without restrictions.

 

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