The generative AIGen AI gold rush is pushing companies to hire for a new role. Tech giants Adobe and Apple have both filled positions at their head offices in the US; Caterpillar, best known for providing construction and mining equipment, advertised for one at the end of last year; and financial services firm Capital One posted an opening in January.

The role in question is the generative engine optimization (GEO) manager. Or it might be referred to as a strategist or specialist – GEO is a new field, so there’s no definitive terminology yet. GEO can also be used interchangeably with answer engine optimization (AEO) and, sometimes, generative search optimization (GSO).

As you may have guessed, GEO is all about optimizing a website’s architecture, wording and data for the likes of Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s ChatGPT and their armies of web crawlers. The easier it is for a chatbot to extract information, the more likely the company will appear in answers.

The emerging role of the GEO manager

The need to hire a GEO manager has come about as companies are demanding better insight into their online visibility and how they appear across traditional search and large language models (LLMs). To help meet this demand, Adobe recently acquired marketing platform Semrush for $1.9bn to expand its product offering with AI search capabilities.

At the end of 2023, Gartner forecast organic search traffic will have halved by 2028 as consumers opt for AI search tools instead.

"Generative engines represent the single biggest shift in marketing I've seen in the last ten years,” says Niall Moran, director of PR at Marketbridge. “According to Forrester's 2026 B2B Buyer Insights report, Gen AI is now the leading source of information in every phase of the buying process.”

Sam Davis, senior director of solutions engineering for EMEA at Yext, says that this shift has rewritten “what it means for a brand to be findable”.

The focus for search engine optimization (SEO) managers has long been on ensuring that content is shaped by experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness, or EEAT. This is a set of guidelines used by publishers to determine content’s quality and validity.

Rather than optimizing content for its ranking on a search engine, namely Google, the emerging role of the GEO manager is to oversee that “trusted, well-governed information is consistently understood and reused across multiple generative systems,” says Davis.

He adds that GEO needs to build on SEO’s “essential foundations”. But, regardless of whether a company is selling a product or professional service, success in AI search is determined less by keywords.

What to look for when hiring a GEO manager

AI search isn’t going to make SEO obsolete. The latter will still be key to content discovery as long as there are search engines. But the former is quickly gaining traction as companies seek a competitive edge.

For those looking to up their AI search game, there’s a completely different set of skills potential hires need.

First of all, says Moran, a GEO manager needs to know how website architectures affect crawlability, how AI search can turn content into citable assets, and how AI search can be used to build third-party authority.

On top of this, a GEO manager needs to “think like an orchestrator, not a specialist”. By this means, he means that they’re capable of conducting teams in different departments so that they are all in tune.

"The role requires someone who can translate technical insights into strategic recommendations across teams that have traditionally operated in silos,” Moran stresses.

“They can work with your web developers to ensure product information is properly structured and machine-readable. And, they can guide your content team on creating assets that balance human engagement with discoverability.

Davis points out that a GEO manager should also display stronger data stewardship skills than an SEO manager. They should obviously have a clear understanding of how LLMs interpret and present information as well as more experience of knowledge graph management.

Evolving SEO into GEO

Companies are becoming acutely aware of the importance of GEO. According to Conductor’s 2026 AEO/GEO CMO Investment Report, 97% of 250 top digital leaders saw a positive impact from GEO in 2025, while 94% plan to increase their investment in AI search this year, allocating 12% of their marketing budget on average.

Despite the rapid advances being made in chatbot capabilities, companies investing in AI search shouldn’t expect instant success. It’ll be up to the GEO manager to continue refining the architecture of the company’s website and the quality of its content to improve when and how the company is surfaced in a chatbot’s responses.

Davis concludes: “It’s the companies that build on their existing SEO maturity and evolve it into GEO that are going to be best positioned as AI-first discovery becomes the norm.”

Cyber security provider ESET has launched a managed detection and response (MDR) bundle, designed to simplify the sales process and help boost the profits of its partners.

Available immediately, the firm said the new offering will enable partners to quote faster, close deals more efficiently, and protect profitability with greater confidence.

As part of the move, all core MDR services and products have been packaged into a single stock-keeping unit (SKU) to make it easier for partners to position, price, and sell.

ESET said it has also introduced improved commercials to help partners deliver greater value and increase their profitability, with a more competitive pricing structure that sees the average buying prices reduced by up to 34%.

Additionally, partners can also leverage increased margin protection for enhanced commercial security – a move the company said will ensure opportunities are "safeguarded from start to finish".

ESET said the move reinforces its commitment to ensuring security delivery is both accessible and profitable – especially for MSPs serving SMBs.

"This new MDR bundle is a direct response to our partners' need for simplicity and stronger commercial outcomes," commented Matt Knell, ESET's UK country manager. "It's now easier than ever to deliver our core MDR solutions with compelling pricing and robust profit protection."

Built on a combination of AI capabilities and human expertise, ESET's range of cloud-first cybersecurity products and services are designed to help secure organizations and their critical infrastructure across endpoints, cloud, mobile, and beyond.

The release of the firm's new MDR bundle builds on its strong recent momentum in the MSP space and follows upgrades to its management platform, a heightened focus on simplified integration, as well as increased market development funds (MDF) designed to help partners scale.

Last month, the company announced a host of updates, including the addition of ransomware remediation to the ESET PROTECT platform, which it said offers next-generation ransomware rollback and remediation features to help prevent ransomware encryption from causing long-term business disruption.

Other upgrades included a new ESET Cloud Security module updated with anti-spoofing and homoglyph protection, as well as expanded availability of its AI Advisor tool to EDR/XDR customers.

Valuable partner marketing skills are at risk of being lost as the structure of channel marketing teams continues to shift, according to research from Coterie.

Revealed at the firm’s Coterie Connect event in London, The 2025 Partner Marketing Skills Report was conducted in collaboration with Sapio Research and covers trends, gaps, and opportunities across the industry.

As partner and field marketing teams are increasingly being merged, the data revealed that just 15% of partner marketers are now working in fully independent teams.

This, the study warned, appears to be diluting the specialist skills required to run effective partner marketing programs and reducing these blended teams’ confidence in their own abilities.

According to Coterie, urgent investment in training and development is required to prevent the channel losing the expertise crucial to driving future growth, with company co-founder Jo Dunkley describing the research as a “wake-up call” for businesses.

“We’re seeing partner marketers in integrated teams feeling less confident in their ability to succeed, and that should raise alarm bells,” she said, adding that the shift is being driven by a mix of budget pressure and misunderstanding.

“Many C-level executives assume that partner marketing can just piggyback on field marketing efforts, using the same content, campaigns, and creative,” Dunkley added.

“And because teams often share martech systems, there’s a belief that combining roles will create efficiency. But what’s being lost are the specialist skills that actually make partner marketing work.”

Coterie said attendees at its Connect event echoed the concerns surrounding the trend, agreeing that CMOs and senior executives must act to protect partner marketing skills to aid long-term channel performance.

Future skills

The report also delved into other areas such as marketing budgets, spending patterns, and strategic priorities, and highlighted the skills partner marketers see as crucial for success over the next five years.

At the top of the list, MarTech and digital marketing are viewed as the most important for both the future and the current industry landscape, while AI and automation has climbed up the list into second since last years’ data, up from 15% to 27%.

Rounding out the top three, data and analytics capabilities was found to have doubled from 12% to 27%.

“Senior executives place a lot of value on data and the certainty that data provides,” commented Helen Curtis, fellow co-founder of Coterie Connect. “By using AI, data and analytics, channel marketers can better demonstrate ROI, something that could finally secure the budget increases that partner marketing has long needed.”

Training

As the presence of AI continues to gather pace, the research revealed that partner marketers still feel unprepared for the industry-wide shift.

Respondents ranked the technology as the number one priority area in which they need training for success by 2030, followed by strategic thinking, and data and analytics skills.

While traditional communications and negotiation skills have dropped down the list of perceived importance, Coterie revealed that adaptability has rocketed up the list, from being one of the lowest ranked areas to being one of the six most critical skills for future success.

MORE FROM ITPRO

• MSPs need to adopt a “more Rolex, less airline” approach to customer engagement
• Surging CNAPP investment is a big opportunity for the channel
• SonicWall pins ‘transformational year’ on strong partner growth

It’s not every day that cybersecurity marketing professionals get to speak to one another, compare notes, and come up with innovative solutions for getting their voices heard.

Despite being a cornerstone of the tech industry, cybersecurity is in need of constant marketing on its behalf. Developers need individuals willing to enter the boardroom to advocate for their product and cybersecurity marketers have to arm themselves with the right storytelling skills to get their message across.

The Cybersecurity Marketing Society describes itself as a community for cybersecurity marketers to network, share skills, and learn from one another – but what does this mean in practical terms?

In this episode, Jane and Rory speak to Gianna Whitver, co-founder & CEO at the Cybersecurity Marketing Society, and Maria Velasquez, co-founder & chief growth officer at the Cybersecurity Marketing Society, to discuss their work in the sector and the realities of running a podcast all about cybersecurity marketing.

Highlights

“It was really, really hard being a marketer in cybersecurity in the early years of our careers in this highly complex, highly technical industry. It took one phone call and two women in cyber deciding, ‘You know what, I think we need a home for our thoughts and our feelings’ and for us to really come together as one to help each other out.”

“I think that the AI revolution, evolution, whatever it is, is going to make marketers have to think more about quality. Because with the increase of production capabilities that come with this AI, like press a button, write a blog, marketers will have to now consider is this interesting? Is this helpful? Is this relevant? When it used to be a little more baked in.”

“We want to hear what resonates with you all, with the security practitioners, IT practitioners because if we're doing stuff that is not resonating that’s annoying, then we're not doing a great job marketing, right? We want to improve these relationships and improve what we're doing so that everybody is making marketing that both marketers and companies can be proud of, but also that delights and makes our buying audiences happy.”

Footnotes

• https://cybersecuritymarketingsociety.com/
• https://cybersecuritymarketingsociety.com/podcast/
• How AI is transforming businesses in the tech channel
• Mandiant exec thinks AI could boost diversity in cybersecurity
• Security and marketing are the top software spending priorities for 2023

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Digital analytics provider Amplitude has struck up a new strategic partnership with marketing and sales software specialist, HubSpot.

The expanded collaboration aims to help go-to-market (GTM) teams close more deals by combining HubSpot’s Smart CRM capabilities with Amplitude’s customer behavior data.

HubSpot’s Smart CRM platform equips users with a comprehensive company record to allow marketing, sales, and service teams to access a single, unified view of a customer.

Through the new partnership, teams will now be able to combine these capabilities with Amplitude’s data to target further growth.

Marketers will be able to leverage HubSpot’s enhanced lead scoring with Amplitude insights baked in, which the pair said will provide opportunity to serve up better leads to sales as well as build more targeted marketing campaigns.

HubSpot’s customer health scoring functionality with integrated behavioral insights will also help sales and customer success teams understand the right time for expansions and mitigate the risk of customer churn, the pair added.

"HubSpot customers have told us they want better visibility into user behavior in their products," commented Andy Pitre, HubSpot’s executive vice president of product. “They know this data is key to accelerating growth.

"Our partnership with Amplitude delivers the context organizations need to be successful. When marketing, sales, and support teams are aligned, they can drive better results."

GTM teams will be able to track product usage alongside traditional CRM data, with access to Amplitude charts within their HubSpot dashboards, as well as product usage data and key buying signals to help target customer cohorts. Users can also add HubSpot data to Amplitude to better understand marketing campaign performance.

Additionally, the collaboration is making it easier for HubSpot customers to leverage Amplitude, with swift installation in just minutes and no learning curve. Amplitude is also natively integrated into HubSpot’s App Marketplace.

Commenting on the move, Francois Ajenstat, Amplitude’s chief product officer, said the aim is to help businesses unlock the power of their products and achieve their growth goals.

"Product-led growth is the most efficient way to drive revenue, but it's not easy to pull off,” he explained. “Amplitude and HubSpot are changing that. Instead of wasting time on the wrong leads and the wrong campaigns, teams can use product behavior signals to upsell, convert, and retain more customers."

WhatsApp Business users will face higher costs later this year as the platform increases the price of marketing messages, though users will see a drop in the cost of utility messages. 

First reported by TechCrunch, a spokesperson for WhatsApp confirmed the price hike in a statement given to ITPro. These changes, the spokesperson noted, aim to "better reflect" the way the service is used. 

“WhatsApp is a great way for people and businesses to get things done – everything from booking a flight, getting a back-in-stock alert or receiving a timely delivery update,” they said.

“We occasionally make adjustments to our offerings to better reflect the ways in which the service is used and the types of information people are choosing to receive.”

WhatsApp’s parent company Meta charges WhatsApp Business accounts based on four different categories. These include the marketing, authentication, customer service, and utility categories.

The marketing category, through which users can send customers offers and product announcements, is set for an increase. However, the utility category, which allows businesses to inform customers of updates to orders or account balances, will drop in price, the company confirmed.

Meta is rolling out the price changes at different speeds, with the new utility rate prices set to come into effect from August 4 while the marketing rate changes will be introduced in early October.

The extent of these rate changes will differ based on location. In India, for example, marketing rates will increase by 8% while utility rates will decrease by 67%.

The rates specifically refer to the amount paid by a business user per conversation, which is deemed as any 24-hour thread between a WhatsApp Business user and a customer of that business.

This move to increase marketing message rates comes on the back of long-running complaints from customers about spam messaging, with many reporting overloaded WhatsApp inboxes filled with messages from business users.

WhatsApp Business has changed customer relationships

WhatsApp first began charging businesses to send messages to customers back in 2018. This was the first major revenue stream the platform was looking to capitalize on. 

Since then, WhatsApp has continued to focus on its business platform and many commercial users now take advantage of the app to send their customers promotional messages or keep in contact with them from a customer service perspective.

Salesforce, for example, is partnered with WhatsApp to help its own clients connect with customers more effectively through a more bespoke, customized messaging service.

WhatsApp is also often used by businesses internally to support communication functions. In late 2022, Meta announced the platform's new ‘communities’ feature as a way of bringing smaller group chats into larger ones, helping organize chats by department or office location.

They’re two of the most dangerous words in the English language: “per user”. See them next to a software licensing price and watch your monthly costs rocket, and it’s as true for communications solutions as it is for every other service you pay for. If not worse, with dangerous hidden T&Cs designed to make it tricky to escape a contract’s clutches.

3CX has the answer in the form of the all-new 3CX V20. As you’ve become used to with 3CX, the service is free forever for up to ten users. And that includes all the features highlighted below.

In short, where others are charging $20 per user per month for their communications platforms, 3CX is offering you a full service for free. And where others tie you into long-term contracts with phone numbers owned by the platform, making it hard for you to move away, 3CX keeps things simple. You own the numbers, you decide the calling package.

And if you want to take advantage of 3CX’s most advanced contact centre features, 3CX SMB costs just £195 for a year. No contracts, no hidden extras and no gotchas either.

What’s new in V20?

There’s never been a better time to start using 3CX, as it has just been upgraded to version 20. More than two years in the making, 3CX V20 includes a rewritten Call Manager to deliver the best call centre features; a new native Windows softphone (more on that below); plus a new Admin Console, replacing the former Management Console.

3CX has enhanced security in this release, too. It has completely rebuilt the network to be both hardened and isolated, making it as secure against attacks as possible, and backed that up with new EDR monitoring tools and off-site 24/7 monitoring staffed by threat-hunting specialists. 

And it has enhanced the product security features with password hashing, locking down the web client by IP address and enforcing 2FA where Google’s single sign on architecture isn’t already in place.

Then there’s the new native 3CX Windows softphone, which adds extra security as it’s deployed via the Windows store. Like the existing iOS and Android apps, you can run it in conjunction with the web client and, rather than a simple call notification, it comes with a proper answer dialog. As a native softphone it also allows for audio control to be independent from the browser.

What you get for free, forever

Whether you choose the 3CX Free service or the paid-for 3CX SMB V20 package, everything a small business needs for a comms system is there. That includes full integration with WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, plus Live Chat – that is, 3CX’s WordPress integration to help site visitors.

You even get unlimited videoconferencing on top of free calls. That means the only fee you need to pay is for the external numbers you buy. See our box, “Choosing the right SIP trunk” for more details on this.

You also enjoy full use of the web client, the new Windows softphone, plus the iOS and Android apps. As per 3CX’s long-standing promise, this is free, forever, and your licence covers up to ten users.

Advanced features

As stated right at the top of this article, 3CX doesn’t want people to fall into the trap of long-term contracts with per-user pricing. That’s why the advanced, paid-for version of 3CX SMB V20 costs a fixed yearly fee of £195 for up to ten users and £295 for up to 20 users.

So, what do you get for your money? The answer is a more managed product designed for more demanding users, such as multi-level interactive voice response (IVR). While the free version of 3CX does offer IVR, mutli-level means you can direct callers to the sales or support departments (for example) rather than directly to one number.

You will also benefit from call queues, reporting tools and the “Barge in, Listen or Whisper” feature. This means a manager can monitor an agent’s call, and intercede where necessary – such as “whispering” into the agent’s ear, while the caller won’t hear a thing.

And while the free version of 3CX includes up to three deskphones, 3CX SMB provides any number of deskphones and backs it up with support. You get SMS/MMS support, too.

Too good to be true?

The catch? There is no catch at all. 350,000 customers worldwide have used 3CX’s service to make it the leading PBX VoIP provider in the global telephony market. In the same way WhatsApp revolutionised text messaging, 3CX wants to revolutionise business communications – and make it fair and freely available to all.

What’s more, 3CX is always looking to the future. With V20, it has laid the foundations for deep integration of AI. Starting with call transcription and reporting, it has created the ability not just to transcribe calls but also analyse and report on them. It’s a space to watch in the coming months.

And AI is just one example: this is a secure and expandable architecture designed for improvements. Join the 3CX forum and follow the company on your favourite social media platform to discover its ongoing plans – with Microsoft Teams integration, extra reporting capabilities, multi-tenancy and advanced mixing features during video conferencing just a few of 3CX’s planned upgrades.

Try 3CX FREE www.3cx.com/signup

Lush Cosmetics, known for its handmade, organic bath bombs, soaps, and other beauty and skincare products, has a strong global presence, with an annual revenue of more than $1 billion at its peak. 

Behind the scenes, however, the brand has faced a challenge: its customer care operation in North America was completely isolated from other regions across the world. In the UK, Lush used Zendesk to support customer service interactions across Europe, Asia, and Australia. Meanwhile, North America had its own Zendesk instance and website.

“Our challenge was to bring us together in such a way that the customers have a seamless conversation no matter where they come in contact with us in the world,” says Naomi Rankin, Lush’s global customer care manager. 

“This is the main goal,” adds Carla Borges, operations assistant manager at Lush, North America. “That our service around the world is available for our customers live whenever they need us.”

The organization wanted to unify all regions under a single Zendesk instance and dot-com website to enable 24/7 customer support globally and create a seamless customer experience. Sounds simple enough? In reality, this required migrating data, rebuilding channels, and ensuring a smooth transition for customers and agents worldwide. 

Unifying everything under one umbrella

Lush conducted thorough research before selecting Zendesk as its customer service and sales enablement platform. “We did due diligence and considered other providers, but many didn’t offer the bespoke reporting capabilities that are so important to our founders and leadership team,” Rankin explains.

The implementation process, meanwhile spanned approximately two months and involved consolidating tools, migrating data, and rebuilding channels.

First, the teams unified their ticket fields and processes. “We traveled to the UK and sat together,” Borges recalls. “We were like, ‘let’s take a look at what we are and what we have, and let’s create one global form’ [to gather specific information from customers].” 

Next came configuring the workflows and automations through custom triggers. According to Borges, “triggers are basically to build conditions and actions”. If a particular condition is met, you action something specific the business needs.

Migrating data from the North American instance was also crucial. As Borges notes: “We didn't want to lose that information. Because that's like the core customer care, right? Like we have such a valuable piece of information to share with the business.”

Finally, the organization rebuilt its North American channels from scratch to ensure continuity. Rankin's team handled much of the configuration themselves, given their expertise. The business already used phone, SMS, email, and live chat in Zendesk, so they had to rebuild the channels in the new instance.

Ultimately, the collaborative effort between Lush's internal Zendesk specialists and the vendor's implementation staff resulted in a consolidated system ready for seamless omnichannel support.

Reaping the benefits of consolidation

Implementing a unified platform,  Rankin explains, delivered significant benefits, including 24/7 customer support. “For the first time, our frontline team, who look after all customer support is unified; there's 24-hour English language access for customers, which we're hoping to expand to other languages.”

The consolidated system also allowed smoother communication between regions, with Borges citing an example of a North American customer reaching out to the UK team. “They'd have all the conversations in the ticket,” she says. “However, the UK team was unable to reassign that ticket to our team, and we had full visibility of all the details. Essentially, they would contact us, sending screenshots of the conversation and saying, 'Hey, this customer reached out, and we need to explain everything that happened,' instead of simply reassigning the ticket to our brand because we weren't in the same instance."

With all data unified, Lush can more quickly pinpoint issues and improve products globally. As Borges explains: "If a bath bomb is causing stains in bathtubs here in North America, we can investigate whether this same product affects our customers worldwide. Alternatively, it might be a local production quality issue, or perhaps the product's specifications need adjustment. Having access to this data is crucial for making informed business decisions."

According to Rankin, the initiative delivered a staggering 369% return on investment. "We went from the very beginning in 2014, when the teams were just using Gmail and answering paper letters, to how we're using it now – in a single instance with all of our agents unified on one contract.”

The company has also seen an increase of 17% in support agent productivity. Lush successfully sidestepped the need for extra personnel to handle customer inquiries, resulting in an annual average cost reduction of £215,700. Improvements to productivity have allowed Lush to achieve an average annual cost savings of £136,100 by avoiding the need to hire additional managers.

Tips for a successful digital transformation

Lush's experience highlights several important lessons for technology initiatives, the first being effective communication.

"Make sure you know who your really good team members are and use them, because actually you're all really invested in it now as well," Rankin says. By involving team members across regions, Lush benefited from diverse expertise.

Second, lean on internal expertise where possible. "Have strong people as leads who knew Zendesk and could involve everybody, keeping communication flowing and working together,” says Borges, adding this expedited the implementation.

Finally, understand your goals upfront. "Have that purpose,” Rankin adds. "For us, our purpose was a unified global team and 24-hour chat. Whenever we got there, that was where we needed to end up and so we let that kind of guide our decision." 

Defining the desired outcomes and use cases makes selecting and implementing the right system easier. By tapping cross-functional teams, empowering specialists, and aligning on goals early, Lush drove an effective consolidation.

Community Fibre is London’s largest alt-net and provides 100% full-fiber broadband in competition with larger players such as Virgin Media O2 (VMO2) and BT. With a goal to provide full-fiber connectivity to 2.2 million businesses and homes by the end of 2024, it had to rapidly expand its network as well as its customer service operations.

With this aim in mind, the firm partnered with AWS to deliver its customer service operations via Amazon Connect, the cloud-based contact center solution.

Community Fibre CIO Chris Williams is bullish on the firm’s performance so far, saying it continues to move at a pace and enjoys a 4.9-star rating on Trustpilot.

“Having that focus on London means that we can probably do things in a slightly different way to our competition, certainly the bigger alt-nets, and the VMO2s, the BTs, that are far more geographically spread,” he tells ITPro.

Opting for AWS against the odds

In the 18 months since he joined Community Fibre, the company has transformed sixteen areas in need of an overhaul, thanks in no small part to assistance from AWS. Despite the partnership bearing fruit, Williams tells ITPro it wasn’t a shoe-in when Community Fibre first began its search for a partner. 

“We did a big scan of the market, if I’m honest. Coming from BT, EE, there’ve been particular vendors I would have traditionally used in that space.”

Prior to his role at Community Fibre, Williams worked for five years as technology director for sales and service at BT, and nine years as director of IT service management at EE. Both roles prepared him for large call center implementations. At BT, one of the last projects he undertook was to deliver work-from-home capabilities to BT’s entire agent workforce, a massive undertaking that required large–scale application of existing technologies.

“I would say, at the start, Amazon Connect was one we'd added to our list because we've been having conversations anyway,” he admits.

“I’m not sure I expected the end of the process to be that we would have chosen, but we had some pretty strong criteria. And what we wanted to do was put the customer really at the heart of what we did, and experience is absolutely everything in terms of what we're doing.”

Embracing new communication channels

When it comes to its customer experience (CX), Community Fibre has been keen to avoid being a “one-trick pony”. Practically, this meant moving beyond voice and adopting an omnichannel approach including email alongside phone calls, and routing customers to the most appropriate agent at all times.

“We understand that particular channels are geared toward answering particular customer query types,” he explains. “And we wanted to make sure that we had the flexibility to be able to put the customer in the channel that was going to serve them best, as well as the one that these customers wanted to be served in as well.”

Going into the partnership, Williams says his team discovered no downsides to a more digital approach, in which customers could derive value from more personalized experiences.

“You still paid for services, of course, but it encouraged you to be able to focus on things like that experience without worrying about how many licenses you bought; how many seats in the contact center; do you need to spend another £10,000 because you need another five agents, et cetera.”

Down the line, Community Fibre is interested in further exploring Amazon Connect’s speech analytics features, available through Amazon Connect Contact Lens. This allows for customer conversations to be transcribed, customer ‘sentiment’ to be analyzed in real-time for instant feedback, and for agents to receive automatic performance evaluations.

A machine learning layer to the service also seeks to derive value from recurring data points across conversations, such as which agent sign-offs make customers the happiest. “I would say, for us, it's core to get things right first,” he says. “We know we have a number of data use cases that are obvious to us and probably a bigger focus than the analytics piece at the moment because we can see from our data that those are things we need to address.”

Finding the right use cases

Williams says in the lead-up to the Amazon Connect implementation, the firm was “frantically writing” some of these use cases to be delivered as soon as the platform was finalized. 

“We feel as though we've got the data points, but we're not yet universally using them to understand even 90% of the reasons the customer calls before they land,” he explains.

The same goes for some of AWS’ other advanced capabilities, such as the firm’s increasing focus on AI. While Community Fibre is interested in AI’s varied use cases, it’s more focused on ethical implementations.

“It’s fair to say that we could probably brainstorm 100 applications for it right now in our business where it could potentially add value. What we’re trying to do is hone down those opportunities to ones that are safe, that provide value to us and to our customers.”

What does a win-state look like for Community Fibre? Williams says using the data derived from its omnichannel contact center to more intelligently resolve customer concerns before they even have to get in touch.

“That's our end game, and we're trying to design our experience programs not to shave seconds off average handle time necessarily, but looking at where the core problem is and trying to resolve that before it gets to the customer. 

“The other thing is when when you're growing the base as fast as we are, a good result for us is the same number of calls comes in next month as this month. Since I joined, we're three-and-a-half times the base that we were, and if we can negate the product-to-consumer impact of the base growth then we're doing a tremendous job.”

It’s close to just three months since Elon Musk took the helm at Twitter, and his tenure has been rocky, to say the least. His first month in charge saw mass layoffs, a new revenue stream that led to widespread impersonation, and the CEO at one point even locking the doors of the company’s San Francisco headquarters.

Twitter, as a result, is being sued by former workers amid complaints about the quality of the service rising, reporting cash flow issues, and brands weighing up whether or not to be active on the platform at all. An impersonation of pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly, for example, caused its stock price to tumble, after a fake account with a paid-for blue tick said it would provide free insulin. The rocky start has also thrown advertising spend – Twitter’s main source of income – into doubt, with large companies withholding cash due to the rising instability.

The rise of social media was once seen as a new dawn for communications and marketing, giving brands the tools and channels to reach customers directly. Turbulence at Twitter, alongside ups and downs at platforms like Instagram, Facebook and TikTok, though, means brands might need to examine how to evolve beyond social media for good.

Economic chaos and an unpredictable future

The shake-up of Twitter and its policies, particularly around content moderation and free speech has caused brands to reconsider their position on advertising through the platform, says Madeleine Sampson, telecommunications, media and technology analyst at Fitch Solutions.

“Companies such as General Motors, Audi, VW, and Pfizer have all paused advertising on the platform and have adopted a 'wait and see' approach,” she says. “Apple has reportedly cut its advertising spending on Twitter, receiving considerable public criticism from Elon Musk, and brands risk criticism for ending their association with 'free speech' or pursuing a ‘woke agenda’.

“All of this comes at a time when brands are already reining back their marketing spending due to inflation and the rise in operating expenses. Therefore, big tech is suffering significantly from the fall in advertising demand over the course of the year.”

Economic conditions don’t help the advertising business Twitter relies on, and neither does Musk’s erratic management style, nor the deteriorating quality of the platform. Users have reported the platform might crash completely, and anyone that says they can predict what will happen in the future is – as Rebecca Wettemann, CEO of industry analyst firm Valoir says – “full of it".

“I think a lot of CMOs have been pulling their hair out over the past month as they try to figure out what's happening next,” she says. “We are seeing a number of challenges for brands and marketers as they think about how to reach customers. Twitter is one piece of that, and concerns about Twitter are part of it.

“But we also have to think about what's happening with cookie deprecation, and the other challenges marketers have trying to reach this goal of being able to create one-on-one, personalised experiences for customers.

“In the short term, certainly we're seeing budgets be pulled back for Twitter, but we're also seeing companies surveying the other tools and technologies out there to help them understand what value they may get from Twitter versus other sources.”

Brands are falling out of love with social media

The question for brands could reasonably shift from debating how much of a presence to have on platforms like Twitter – to them asking whether it’s worth having a presence at all on popular social media platforms, given the risks. It’s especially true given the old adage of businesses craving long-term certainty.

One of the many roles Twitter plays is to serve as a contact point for frustrated customers. When all else fails, after being driven around in circles by chatbots or spending half an hour on the phone, calling out brands on Twitter is a regular occurrence.

Add to this the problem of the Twitter pile-on, in which swathes of users rally against a brand or person, and businesses might feel they’re between a rock and a hard place. However, Chris Bignell, founder of XL Communications, says a coherent communications strategy could avoid this, and that businesses are called out because people feel like they have nowhere else to go.

“It's very easy for brands to get called out on Twitter, and I think that's why the public has kind of jumped on it because it's a way of publicly shaming a company,” he says. “But I think most people turn to Twitter because they get a response. That’s led to corporations moving their call centre staff to Twitter, rather than answering phones, which means that by publicly shaming a company, the customer is probably more likely to get a quicker result.

What comes after social media?

As Bignell alludes to, the challenge with Twitter at the moment is not just down to the way that it’s run, but in maintaining the ways brands rely on it to communicate with customers directly. Wetteman says joining up the channels of communications, whether over email, phone, social media, or through their own website, would help alleviate the reliance they have on Twitter. Many brands have more to learn when it comes to customer interaction, she adds.

“There's a lot of interaction that happens before a ‘one-to-one’ communication, and some of the really interesting and innovative stuff that I'm seeing is around using artificial intelligence (AI) to understand, not just when a customer creates that one on one communication, but what happens way before that,” she continues. “Businesses want to understand what customers search, their activity on community sites, their activity on the website, to get a better understanding of what they need to do to make a customer happy, rather than just what their interaction may be with a chatbot.”

As brands look away from social media, the question of what comes next still looms – whether it’s another dominant social media platform or Twitter alternative, or something entirely different, like a metaverse-based experience.

Things don’t look like they’ll improve for Twitter any time soon. As Sampson points out, a pause on advertising is not good for Twitter’s profitability, on top of a user base that could fall. “Around 90% of Twitter revenues come from advertising, but the introduction of the Twitter Blue subscription service, as an attempt to build new revenue streams, could see advertising take a back seat and become less relevant to advertisers over the long-term,” she says. “Musk stated he wants to create 'the most respected advertising platform in the world', but it’s too early to say what the result of Musk’s overhaul will have on the number of Twitter users, which is one reason why some companies are biding their time before making a final decision.”

TD Synnex Maverick has struck an agreement with Zoom that brings the communications and collaboration platform to its channel partners in Europe.

A specialist business of distribution giant TD Synnex, Maverick provides professional audiovisual, collaboration, and digital signage solutions to sectors such as education, corporate, and retail. The firm says it is focused on enabling partners to address the fast evolving market opportunity for solutions that support smart virtual collaboration and hybrid working models.

In addition to offering Zoom, Maverick said it will also offer partners a comprehensive portfolio of Zoom-enabled hardware and software products from various brands across the industry, as well as access to technical resources accreditations to enable deployment.

Hugo Graça, senior vice president of specialised solutions at TD Synnex, said the Zoom agreement represents an opportunity for European partners to “accelerate their smart collaboration offerings at scale”.

“Our specialist Maverick teams across the region are poised to extend Zoom’s reach across the channel, helping our partners to deliver on the promise of true hybrid work flexibility, simplifying deployment and accelerating go-to-market with comprehensive solutions combining hardware and software to address the demand for hybrid and virtual collaboration solutions,” he said in an announcement.

Through Maverick, partners now have access to the entire Zoom portfolio, including Zoom One, which bundles together a multitude of individual solutions into a single unified communications platform.

There’s also access to the recently-launched Zoom Contact Center, an omnichannel offering designed to help answer end-customers’ questions and solve issues faster. Maverick says the offering works in tandem with the rest of its portfolio to create modern meeting spaces with high quality video and audio.

Partners can also incorporate the likes of Zoom Rooms, Zoom Phone, Zoom Events, Zoom IQ, Zoom Webinars, and Zoom Whiteboard into the solutions they take to market, the firm said.

Dion Smith, Zoom’s head of channels for EMEA, said it was the perfect time for the company to extend the reach of its solutions portfolio to the channel, as the global workforce continues to embrace hybrid working.

“The breadth and reach of TD Synnex across Europe, allied to their operational strength and the deep specialisation of the Maverick team, provide a great launchpad for us to accelerate adoption of the evolving range of Zoom solutions and tools,” he said.

Elon Musk’s $44 billion acquisition of Twitter, has dramatically shifted the social media landscape in recent three weeks. Indeed, fears cast earlier this year that Musk would mismanage the business are beginning to materialise.

The social network has always been a destination for professionals in the IT industry and the wider tech community. Whether they use Twitter to network, showcase new tools and products, share cyber security research or build their brands, it’s been a reliable vehicle for more than 15 years.

Now, however, with concerns mounting about the rise of ‘verified’ fake accounts, and the growing prospect of unmoderated abuse, not to mention destabilisation sparked by an exodus of engineers, many question Twitter’s long-term viability. With users pontificating about Twitter’s last days, it’s worth asking where IT professionals are looking to replace the various professional use cases Twitter served.

To say there are a plethora of alternatives is an understatement. Mastodon is grabbing most of the headlines – and is the leader amongst professionals IT Pro spoke with. Other competitors, including Hive Social, Post.News, and a soon-to-come offering from Bot Sentinel, mean the landscape is crowded. We should note, Twitter’s widely-forecast demise may never materialise and, despite many alternatives, none may be able to truly replace it.

Mastodon

Website: https://joinmastodon.org/

Initial release: 2016

Number of users: More than 2.5 million

Far and away the current favourite to eat into Twitter’s market share is the decentralised and open source offering, Mastodon. Founded in 2016, the platform has seen a tremendous spike in users, both when Elon announced his expensive takeover in April, and once that transaction was confirmed.

Attempting to nail down its number of users is a nightmare, given this count keeps rising, but, at the time of publication, the organisation had announced it could boast more than 2.5 million.

The transition hasn't been smooth, though. Joey D’Antoni, principal consultant at Denny Cherry & Associates Consulting, says Mastodon is unlikely to scale in the way Twitter has. This is despite the possibility that he finds many of his colleagues have decided to transition away from the silicon valley behemoth.

“Twitter had a viable business model. They were making some money before they inherited, you know, $13 billion in debt,” he says. “If you try to start a platform like Twitter now and you can monetize it early, you could have something that would be successful. It wouldn't be a juggernaut or anything. I don't know that I see that with Mastodon; I could see maybe somebody trying to monetise that open source code and build their own system.”

Mastodon also comes with security risks. Direct messages are readable by the owner of each server or instance. Each server also has its own rules, some of which have come under fire for silencing critique of the platform itself. Malek Karim, a New Jersey-based IT professional, says it’s almost impossible to be critical on the platform, and that’s part of why he has spread out where he’s spending his time.

“A huge problem with Mastodon is you can't complain about Mastodon on Mastodon for fear of people calling you toxic or fear of having your account disabled.”

Karim says he’s also hesitant about adopting the platform more broadly because he sees minimal search functionality and a distinct lack of users of colour. For him, at least for now, he’s building community on business-focused platforms like LinkedIn, while still maintaining a presence on Twitter.

Hive Social

Website: https://www.hivesocial.app/

Initial release: 2019

Number of users: More than one million

Part of the reason Mastodon is currently dominating the conversation is that it’s had time to work out some – though far from all – of its kinks. Hive Social, meanwhile, was founded in 2019 and has also sustained a recent rise in users.

D’Antoni says one of the issues with any of these alternatives is that, at the end of the day, content moderation is going to be a significant bottleneck. “The moderation capability [of any platform] requires humans. You can build some artificial intelligence (AI) around some of that but, at the end of the day, you still need humans there to really do that effectively,” he says.

Hive Social was critiqued by CNN recently for not meeting its policy objectives. Until recently, it was also only available through the Apple App store, with the Android version in beta. Although it's now available through the Google Play Store, those with Android smartphones seem to be taking a wait-and-see approach.

A sample of the conversation about Hive Social on Twitter points to cautious optimism, mixed with trepidation about such a small team. Reportedly as few as three actually run the platform, according to Business Insider, with the team tasked with managing a steadily increasing number of users – only set to grow in the coming days and weeks. Without desktop capabilities, however, and without the experience a host of other platforms can boast, it’s difficult to see IT workers flooding to Hive social en masse.

Post.News

Website: https://post.news/

Initial release: 2022

Number of users: 180,000

One of two platforms not so accessible to the public, Post.news – the brainchild of former Google staffer Noam Bardin – promises a near-Utopian environment. Post is built on the philosophy that “all humans are created equal, endowed with unalienable rights that include life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, regardless of their gender, religion, ethnicity, race, sexual orientation, net worth, or beliefs”.

It’s the type of marketing copy that sounds like it was lifted directly from the American Declaration of Independence. The site is currently in closed beta, and you can sign up for a waiting list that, at its last count, was over 180,000.

Bardin, whose self-styled title on the platform is chief poster, continues to say the mission statement of Post is to prioritise “civil conversation”. This is a term that’s made some outspoken Twitter users uncomfortable, because of its connection to tone policing – where marginalised users are asked to not be their authentic selves so a privileged majority can feel more comfortable. Post seems well aware that its goal of restoring the internet’s “town square” is incredibly ambitious, and it remains to be seen how that effort will go.

Bot Sentinel’s new ‘Twitter-like platform’

Website: https://prebeta.botsentinel.com/

Initial release: TBD

Number of users: 30,000 pre-beta sign-ups

This brings us to another prospective option. While not yet launched, Bot Sentinel, a tool that developer Christopher Bouzy created in 2018 to clean up social media, is mulling over whether to launch an all-new Twitter alternative.

Bot Sentinal is a crowdfunded research company comprising data scientists, machine learning engineers and researchers who specialise in identifying and understanding disinformation and targeted attacks on platforms like Twitter.

Bouzy announce the tentative plan to launch a new social media site in November, with a stated goal to register 100,000 people into the pre-beta to assess its viability to funders and prospective users. Should Bot Sentinal reach this threshold, Bouzy will consider exploring this project further. At the time of writing, the project has registered interest from more than 30,000 Twitter users.

The long-time entrepreneur has been a vocal critic of Musk’s brief Twitter reign, likening the Tesla mogul’s influence to a brand shift towards the likes of Truth Social and 4Chan, on which far-right conspiracy theories are known to proliferate.

BT Wholesale has announced it is making EE connectivity available to partners on a direct, wholesale basis through EE mobile SIM.

Due to be launched in early 2023 upon the completion of trials, members of BT Wholesale’s Partner Plus programme will be able to sell EE SIMs and provide customers with 4G and 5G connectivity.

In an announcement, the firm said the move will boost resellers’ ability to support end users’ evolving all-IP requirements and go-to-market strategies. It also supports the move away from legacy voice setups and helps prepare businesses for the upcoming PSTN switch-off coming in 2025.

“We are constantly striving to make ourselves easier to do business with, and critical to that is ensuring we are delivering what partners want,” said Gavin Jones, channel partners director at BT Wholesale. “For many, that was EE mobile. Enabling resellers to sell EE mobile SIMs is the latest proof point demonstrating our commitment to helping our partners thrive.”

The upcoming PSTN switch-off has accelerated the need for businesses and individuals to move away from legacy setups. Scheduled for 2025, the event will see the UK’s traditional telephone network shut down, with traditional telephony products removed from shelves. Every phone line in the country, whether personal or business setups, will then be IP-based.

As businesses move away from these legacy voice services, Jones said the company’s aim is to provide partners with “complete convergence” across fibre, cloud voice, and mobile.

“The EE mobile SIM is another way to deliver unparalleled access however partners need it,” he continued. “Ultimately, this backs resellers to maximise relationships as customers take more control of their digital destiny.”

EE was the first network provider to launch 5G in the UK and now claims that over 50% of the UK population can use its 5G services. The company said it is now aiming to expand coverage to 90% of the UK landmass with 5G by 2028, complete with requestable, on-demand solutions.

“Making EE SIMs available via a wholesale model means partners can offer customers the might of the UK’s best mobile and biggest fixed broadband networks,” said Jones.

“The pandemic taught the channel that we need to be more flexible in our approach, and that’s reflected in our launches. We provide our partners with flexibility and choice so they can pass that through to their customers as they accelerate their own digital journeys.”

The move is the latest in a string of channel developments for BT Wholesale. Last year, the company launched WHC Express, a cloud-based telephony system for businesses with ten or fewer employees to help them make and receive calls across fixed and mobile devices.

It also unveiled Broadband One, its end-to-end managed service that enables partners to provide small businesses with connections of up to 1Gps across both FTTP and SoGEA.

Business communications firm Twilio has launched a number of new features for its Customer Engagement Platform (CEP) to help businesses build stronger relationships with customers.

Unveiled at the company’s Signal conference in San Francisco on Wednesday, the first announcement was that Twilio Engage is now generally available.

Twilio Engage is a marketing tool that’s been in the market since October 2021 and it allows marketers to use real-time data to improve tasks such as delivering advertisements to customers, making them more effective.

Speaking at Signal, Ivy Grant, VP strategy and operations at Twilio said most marketers currently rely on user data that’s old and doesn’t represent what the customer is looking for at any given moment.

Twilio is marketing Engage as an “omnichannel growth platform” that’s built on top of a customer data platform (CDP) such as Segment.

Using data from a CDP, Twilio Engage can inform a marketer about what a potential customer is wanting to shop for and at what times they usually shop during the day, allowing businesses to serve highly targeted ads at the most opportune times to increase the likelihood of making a sale.

The platform aims to reduce the amount of wasted advertising businesses run, citing the rising cost of serving ads as macroeconomic headwinds continue to adversely impact business’ bottom lines.

Twilio said Domino’s Mexico has already used Twilio engage to stop sending generic marketing campaigns and pivot to a more targeted approach.

This led to a 700% increase in return on ad spend and a 65% reduction in customer acquisition cost, Grant said.

Twilio also announced a new, faster way to authenticate customer logins, eliminating the “friction” involved with steps such as entering one-time passcodes (OTP) and completing CAPTCHA tests.

The company has partnered with more than 56 mobile network operators (MNOs) across more than 30 countries to launch silent network authentication (SNA) for Twilio Verify.

SNA is a possession authentication method that Twilio said is immune to social engineering efforts.

It involves users entering their mobile number to log into their account and then the service checks with the mobile carrier that the SIM used in the device is neither spoofed nor cloned, permitting an authenticated login.

It hopes customer experience (CX) will improve as times to complete login processes will be cut significantly.

One Twilio partner, Indonesia-based Gojek - a ride share, delivery, and shopping app - was able to cut user login times from 20 seconds down to 5 seconds using SNA.

The last major upgrade to Twilio’s CEP was the company’s partnership with Google Cloud to bring a native integration between Google Dialogflow CX and Twilio Voice.

The partnership sees Google’s contact centre AI integrated with Twilio’s voice call platform and aims to improve the automated customer call centre experience.

Twilio Voice customers can now program machines to handle basic tasks without the need to engage human customer support agents.

For example, a travel agency could program Twilio Voice to be able to handle requests like checking flight times using just the AI-powered chat assistant.

Andrew Moore, VP Google and director at Google Cloud AI said the company’s technology allows customers to have more realistic conversations with customers, expressing real human emotion.

He also said experiences won’t require customers to over-enunciate words just because they’re talking to a machine. It aims to improve customer conversations because the advanced AI makes the customer more relaxed, he added.

The AI can also be engaged in real time if a human agent is required to support a case. If a support agent takes a call, Twilio Voice will be able to pull relevant information to the customer’s case on the agent’s screen based on what the customer is saying on the call.

Twilio said this allows businesses to focus more on building relationships and takes away little jobs that can get in the way of focusing on the customer interaction itself.

The new announcements are all framed around the idea of improving the CX so businesses can retain customers in the face of macroeconomic uncertainty.

Twilio’s CEO Jeffo Lawson said it’s more costly to acquire a new customer than ever thanks to rising ad prices, budget constraints, and new cookie laws.

The company said it believes it’s more important now to focus on keeping customers and to do that, businesses need to improve the CX.

When businesses can retain customers, they can further develop the lifetime value (LTV) of that customer, offsetting the cost to acquire customers (CAC).

Lawson said a business’ success in the current economic climate can be determined by how it maximises LTV and minimises CAC, and that’s a measure of how durable a business is in the long term.

Cloud communications firm Avaya has announced a new strategic partnership with Wavenet, a UK-based cloud telecoms and technology provider, to deliver its unified communications as a service (UCaaS) offering to the UK channel.

The collaboration combines UCaaS and contact centre as a service (CCaaS) with its own bundled calls and minutes to help businesses deliver enhanced experiences for customers. Wavenet will act as a wholesale service provider and tier 1 value-added reseller (VAR) across the UK.

Partners will be able to benefit from a self-service managed platform that allows customisation, customer control, as well as the ability to bill customers directly.

Announcing the move at the GITEX Global conference, the pair said the collaboration will enable UK-based organisations to deliver “effortless, best-in-class experiences” for both customers and employees during every interaction.

“Our partners are serving customers in a business environment that has changed significantly over the past couple of years, and against that backdrop, it’s no surprise that demand for cloud-based communications experience technology has increased,” said Antony Black, director of wholesale at Wavenet.

“By offering the combination of the Avaya market-leading UCaaS and CCaaS experience technology with Wavenet’s bundled voice plans, we are able to provide the wholesale partners with a fully self-service managed platform allowing them to control their customers and more importantly bill directly.”

Expected to be available to Wavenet customers and its network of UK wholesale channel partners in Q1 2023, the combined offering can be rolled out to customers within hours, while customisations for more complex infrastructures can be made “quickly and easily”, the pair said.

Fadi Moubarak, Avaya’s vice president of channels, added that the agreement with Wavenet will enable joint partners to “position an enterprise-class solution without the enterprise-class pricing”.

“Being natively cloud-based, the platform will keep customers at the cutting edge in terms of feature sets, and can be flexibly tailored and deployed in diverse ways to match the requirements of any business,” he said.

Phone systems are essential for the operation of small- and medium-sized businesses, and there are many options to choose from. But what if you’re a really small business? What should start-ups be looking for in their phone systems?

That’s where a new product called 3CX StartUP comes in. Its foundation is the 3CX Phone System, but rather than expect small business owners to configure everything themselves, StartUP does the heavy lifting for you. You don’t need to worry about choosing the right settings or even investigating the opaque world of SIP trunks.

You’ll be up and running within minutes, and you can manage your setup from within the web client – the same place where calls and messages come through.

First steps

3CX prides itself on having a “free forever” option. If you have ten or fewer members in your team and don’t need to take advantage of advanced features, StartUP is available and doesn’t even require credit card details.

For existing 3CX customers, it’s easy to add a StartUP system directly from the customer portal (click the “Add Systems” button, then choose “Hosted > Up to 10 users” and follow the steps). It’s just as easy if you’re a new user. Register for a new account at www.3cx.com/startup by entering your email address – or sign up via Google – and then following the four easy steps in the setup wizard.

With this complete, a welcome email lands in your inbox. Follow the link, log in, and then click the Office Settings button on the left-hand side. At this point, you can start adding members of your team, choosing whether they’re a Manager (who will be able to add users themselves) or a User. That’s it.

Make the right call

Now you’re set up, members of your team can call each other directly via the web client or one of the free 3CX apps for iOS, iPadOS and Android. On top of that, anybody can now call them, for free, directly over the internet. Each user is assigned a “talk link” that they can share directly, put on social media or via their email signature. No special app is required as it works from a browser using the WebRTC protocol.

You can create video-conferencing meetings via the equally simple 3CX “meet link”. To avoid spam calls, you can request name and email first and accept or reject the call on that basis.

To connect with the wider phone network – that is, mobiles and landlines – you will need to create an account with a SIP trunk provider. Making your own account means you will have full control over your phone numbers, and most of the time it also means lower-cost calling. 3CX StartUP still removes much of the hassle by supporting SIP trunk providers based on ease of configuration, ease of account setup and pricing.

In the UK, that currently means Brightstar and T4Com. You can read more details at www.3cx.com/partners/sip-trunks/uk, but again no technical knowledge is required as 3CX provides clear step-by-step documentation.

Explore your options

You’ve now covered all the basics. But what about creating announcements and setting up auto-responses for holidays, weekends and anti-social times? After all, who wants to answer a call at midnight? Those features are all included in 3CX StartUP, and once again 3CX will guide you through the process with simple step-by-step guides.

For example, you may want to customise your automatic call handling so that it doesn’t simply route calls based on time (the default) but via different call queues or “ring groups”.

Let’s say you create a shared link for the sales team. Using the ring group function, you can then choose whether incoming calls will “ring all” (where all group members can pick up the call) or switch to a “prioritised hunt”, where it goes to the top group member – as defined by you – and then proceeds down the list. You can even configure a WhatsApp number on your StartUP account that allows you to reply to messages directly from the web client. (You will need a WhatsApp Business account, with a phone number added.)

Then there’s the powerful Live Chat feature. This integrates with sites based on WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, Squarespace, Weebly and Wix, allowing you to take incoming chats and calls directly from visitors to your site.

Time to go PRO?

Everything we’ve covered so far is free. However, there are good reasons to go PRO. If you have up to ten users, the cost is a flat fee of £175 per year. Up to 20 users costs £275 per year. That isn’t per user, or per month, but a flat annual fee. No strings attached.

There are some juicy extras attached, however. Go PRO and you can use multiple call queues rather than rely on one. You can set up a far more advanced digital receptionist who can route calls with multiple options (for example, “press one to reach the sales department, press two to call support, etc”).

It also provides advanced call centre features, plus call reports and call recording. Finally, you can choose your own SIP trunk and use 3CX’s plug’n’play IP phone provisioning.

Learn more about 3CX StartUP Free

The best communications platform as a service (CPaaS) makes it simple and easy to manage integrated communications with your business, while providing a rich array of features.

While there has been a growing shift toward UCaaS (Unified communications as a service), the difference with CPaaS is that it looks to integrate communications directly into key business applications.

This has become possible as computer giants increasingly provide open access to their IT architecture and cloud-based services. Using APIs, business systems can be customised and configured to suit, and even better is that CPaaS can run above any existing legacy systems.

As with any 'platform as a service', CPaaS offers the advantage of scalability, with businesses only paying for the services they actually use, which can make it much more cost-effective than investing in on-premises hardware.

Additionally, APIs aren’t simply about connecting to the cloud but about virtualising communications and integrating them with open architecture services, with many big vendors now easily accommodating this.

While there is inevitably some overlap between CPaaS and UCaaS and CCaaS (Contact Center as a service), CPaaS is specifically about the engine behind all communication services, rather than just focusing on one aspect of it.

1. RingCentral

The leading CPaaS provider

REASONS TO BUY

• Built for the cloud
• Library of APIs
• Strong functionality

RingCentral may not have been the first service to offer CPaaS, but the RingCentral developer platform has become one of the leading services when it comes to cloud communications.

Unlike some established providers who built their systems for on-premise hardware, RingCentral has built their services from the ground-up in the cloud. This has made them an industry leader.

The RingCentral Connect Platform contains an existing library of APIs for customising and configuring all aspects of communications, not least for integrating existing RingCentral Office features into other applications.

While the platform doesn’t aim for simplicity the way some other CPaaS providers do, what it does focus on is functionality, making this a powerful suite of services to use with its main RingCentral Office service.

2. Twilio Flex

The disruptive CPaaS provider

REASONS TO BUY

• Industry leader
• Wide range of applications
• Voice, chat, video, and SIP

REASONS TO AVOID

• Requires technical knowledge

Twilio Flex is a leading platform in the development of CPaaS services. Rather than simply looking to unify communications, they provide the means to completely customise how your communications work.

Although this means using some form of coding, it’s actually really simple and intuitive to use, and makes it relatively easy to create a single API that can control your communications features.

Alternatively, if you only want a programmable solution to a single channel, such as voice services, that can be done, too. In fact, Twilio offer separate pricing for voice, SMS, email, chat, and video, as well as specific APIs for WhatsApp and SIP trunking.

Pricing for Twilio Flex depends on the actual services required and the number of hours required.

3. Brightlink

The outstanding CPaaS solution

REASONS TO BUY

• Focus on ease of use
• Test environment
• Strong CPaaS platform

Brightlink is already an award winning providing of VoIP and UCaaS, but it also offers the Brightlink CPaaS platform as well. What the company manages to do with this, though, is find a good balance between features and functionality, with simplicity and ease of use.

The result is a really strong CPaaS offering that allows for communications functionality to be integrated into all kinds of CRM and marketing tools, for example, using various API’s.

From Brightlink this means for voice, messaging, and SIP, with an additional “command center” which functions as a library for documentation and resources, as well as a test environmental for your API configurations.

The result is an opportunity for enterprises to not only integrate communications across their business, but also provide turnkey access to network services, without the process becoming overly complicated.

4. Amazon Chime SDK

The big cloud CPaaS provider

REASONS TO BUY

• AI services
• Security layer
• Visual editor

We’ve already mentioned that CPaaS allowing for easy integration with cloud services, and Amazon haven’t been slow to latch onto this by providing their own CPaaS offering through AWS, called Amazon Chime.

At its heart Amazon Chime is simple, scaleable, and reliable environment for working with communications integrations. While advertised as a cloud contact solution, that would be understating both the tools and power of this platform.

For a start, Amazon Chime taps into the same AI and dynamic processes that powers Alexa, making for not just a connected platform but a smart one, too. Additionally, Amazon try to make workflows and integrations easy to set up and use by providing a visual editor, so that teams can easily customise what they need without programming anything.

Amazon can do this by having APIs built into its core, but these can still be customised as required. Additionally, integrations are easy to add for other open access platforms such as CRMs.

The result is an easy way to build your own rules and integrations with the simplest voice platform, and because it runs through AWS it means there are the additional benefits of utilising other parts of this service, such as security and AI, as well as only paying for the resources you use.

5. MessageBird

The omnichannel CPaaS provider

REASONS TO BUY

• Omnichannel APIs
• Global carrier network
• Simple customisation

MessageBird is another CPaaS provider worth taking note of, because a couple of reasons: firstly the way they try to keep the whole process as simple and easy to use as possible by providing a visual editor to develop your APIs; and secondly, because of their focus on providing a truly omnichannel experience.

So while other CPaaS services tend to focus on voice, texts, and emails, MessageBird also looks to integrate a comprehensive range of chat applications and options on top of these core services.

Another plus is that Messagebord also has a huge direct-to-carrier infrastructure that allows it to not only provide high quality voice and video communications, but also provide this service global.

This mix of features really makes MessageBird stand out as a CPaaS provider, the simple dashboard tools it provides can only make it attractive to a wide range of businesses for the fact that they are not going to have to hire or divert IT staff simply to carry out their integrations.

Surprisingly, their pricing is competitive in many areas too, especially by comparison to other UCaaS or CCaaS providers.

Most businesses know they must meet customers on the messaging apps they love. But what comes next? Not all conversations are created equal, and a low-quality messaging conversation can do more harm than good.

As a Customer Service leader you need a messaging strategy that offers the right help, in the right way, at the right time.

Download this guide to discover three key components to drive high-value conversations on the WhatsApp Business Platform.

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Across the globe, people love using messaging apps to stay in touch with friends and family. And they increasingly expect the same, effortless communication with businesses. Phoning a call centre no longer appeals.

WhatsApp connects businesses to more than 2 billion monthly users. With analytics, automation and more, it’s the platform that turns messaging into a powerful business tool.

Download this guide now to learn how to bring your customers closer with easy, responsive support.

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Messaging is a new medium that requires a new model of interaction. To make the most of the messaging opportunity, businesses must move beyond impersonal broadcasts and embrace truly personalised conversations.

WhatsApp lets businesses deliver expected, timely and relevant messages to build long lasting relationships with high value customers.

Download this step by step article to learn how to champion a deep, human connection between your audience and your brand.

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Technology has transformed consumer expectations. Now, businesses must transform too:

• By tackling hidden barriers that make browsing, purchasing or communication difficult or slow for consumers.
• By designing customer journeys that delight at every stage.
• And by meeting customers where they are: with mobile friendly solutions on the messaging platforms they love. Platforms like WhatsApp.

Learn how to create deeper, more meaningful connections with your audience are within reach in this guide.

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TikTok has announced Follow Me, a new multi-channel educational programme designed to help SMBs leverage the social media platform to drive business results.

The free 6-week, email-based course aims to provide businesses with a step-by-step guide on how to get started on the platform, acting as a guide for sharing their stories and building an audience.

“We created the Follow Me experience to empower more small businesses to dive into TikTok, so that they can also share their story with the TikTok community and reach their goals,” explained Sujatha Mamidibathula, TikTok’s Head of SMB, North America.

From now until August 19, businesses can register for the latest tips from TikTok’s Small Business Ambassadors, who will offer up advice on how to drive results through community and entertainment.

Follow Me also promises different learning roadmaps based on visitors’ goals, with the email series outlining best practices for running a first campaign on the platform, as well as how to integrate a brand story into videos.

Those signing up will also receive a guide for setting up a free Business Account, access to TikTok’s Creative Center for content inspiration, as well as information on the company’s Ads Manager and Promotion features.

“With Follow Me, any business can integrate the diverse and creative formats available on TikTok into their marketing strategies to involve, connect, and engage with the massive audience base available on the platform,” Mamidibathula added.

The move may provide some improved PR in the business space for the social media platform. Last month, FFC commissioner Brendan Carr urged Apple and Google to remove TikTok from their app stores over its questionable data practices.

The app, which was been downloaded from both app stores almost 19 million times in Q1 2022 alone, is owned by Beijing-based ByteDance, an organisation linked closely to the Communist Party of China and bound to its surveillance demands.

Carr described TikTok as a national security risk and requested Apple and Google to remove it from its app stores for failure to abide by their policies.

The instant messaging platform Telegram has amassed over 700 million monthly active users and will soon be rolling out a 'premium' tier as it looks to monetise a portion of its user base.

Exclusive new features will be added to the paid version, though no pricing has been disclosed for the monthly subscription.

Telegram, which was founded in 2013 by Russian brothers Nikolai and Pavel Durov, famously states that its end goal is not to "bring profit" and even has a non-profit organisation structure. This is largely down to its resistance to deploying targeted in-message advertising, though that stance has softened a little with the company testing non-targeted advertising in public channels.

As such, the premium tier appears to be a way for the company to monetise users that it is comfortable with, in that it keeps it user-driven, rather than based on targetted advertising. The premium tier will include the ability to send large files (4GM up from 2GB) and will support faster downloads as well as capacity for up to 1,000 channels - standard users can only have 500.

Telegram also appears to be the first of the large messaging platforms to roll out a premium tier with none of Signal, Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp having any kind of higher paid-for offering, though, there are unconfirmed reports that WhatsApp is working on a premium tier.

Founder and chief executive, Pavel Durov, had previously said that the premium tier was in response to user demand for additional storage and bandwidth.

​​"After giving it some thought, we realised that the only way to let our most demanding fans get more while keeping our existing features free is to make those raised limits a paid option," he said.

While pricing hasn't been specified for the US and Europe, a premium version in India is available for $6 (US dollars) on iPhone, so the tier could likely be between £4 and £5.

NTT has teamed with Albemarle to help the speciality chemicals firm deploy a pilot private LTE/5G and Wi-Fi network at its Lithium mine in North Carolina.

Albemarle has mining and manufacturing sites across three continents. As an aftermath of globally-imposed COVID-19 restrictions, visiting the facilities ‌became‌ ‌increasingly difficult, which‌ ‌impacted decision-making and timing substantially.

The firm is now working with NTT to build a network that would link its global engineers with technicians for remote site surveys and assistance. The use of private LTE/5G will allow Albemarle to streamline its hybrid working process, in addition to reducing ‌global travel requirements and expenses.

NTT’s global connectivity services will also support wireless networking at Albemarle’s manufacturing sites.

“To enable collaboration and digital applications at our mining and processing sites, we require widespread, high-speed connectivity,” said Chuck Holley, global manager of IT network infrastructure at Albemarle.

“A private LTE/5G network is a great way we can do this cost-effectively, and NTT was our first choice to pilot a design, prove the technology and show the value. With a private LTE/5G network, we’re able to continue to seek out innovative solutions to some of our most pressing challenges,” added Holley.

Albemarle plans to expand the private 5G network beyond Kings Mountain following the pilot.

“We’re incredibly proud to be partnering and consulting with Albemarle on this innovative pilot,” commented Parm Sandhu, VP of enterprise 5G products and services at NTT.

“A private LTE/5G network will continue to transform business outcomes in mission-critical environments for Albemarle, and this is just the start of their journey. We look forward to working closely with the manufacturer as it continues to digitally transform its business for the future.”

In a world bursting with chatbots, communication platforms and other technology intended to streamline comms and customer service, the telephone still reigns as an efficient, clear and personal method of communication.

That being said, you want to be sure that the phone system you’re operating is fulfilling your business needs and guaranteeing the best communication for your organisation. Does your existing system integrate properly with other apps and communication platforms you rely on? Does it properly support your remote workforce? Are you satisfied with the security it offers, and its backup features (if it has any)?

If you’re not sure that your current system is fit for purpose, it may be time to consider alternative providers to find the one that meets your requirements.

Time for a change

For those looking to sample a new phone system, 3CX is offering new customers (as well as existing customers that upgrade to v18) a year’s free hosting, making this the ideal opportunity to trial its services. 3CX will manage the whole operating system, so all you need to worry about is delivering the perfect communications platform for your business.

Some highlights of v18’s new features include improved apps for mobile workers, integration with Microsoft Teams and world-leading video call technology.

This means you can take advantage of a phone system that’s ideal for remote working. You can connect all employees, eliminating inter-office call charges in the process, and that means free office calls for your workers no matter where they are.

What’s more, you can easily create and manage extensions for remote workers, while apps for Windows, web, iOS and Android means people stay connected to the same high level no matter where they are or what device they’re using.

You’re in charge

So, what does “Hosted by 3CX” mean in practice? In short, it removes the burden of day-to-day OS management.

3CX will deploy your instance to DigitalOcean, a tier one cloud infrastructure provider with a 99.99% service level agreement, and automatically configure firewall rules for you.

It will then manage potential time-drains such as security patches and OS upgrades. That means your 3CX instance will be kept on the latest (non-beta) update, so you can benefit from upgrades as soon as they happen. And you don’t need to worry about the latest security threats, as 3CX’s team will ensure you stay protected.

3CX has even created a dedicated support team for its hosted customers, with 24/5 support (European Standard Time) and on-call support during weekends for emergencies. There’s a forum, live chat and a dedicated email address (hosted@3cx.com).

Backups and your data

3CX will also take nightly backups – at around 2am local time of the instance – which are then encrypted and stored in Google Cloud.

However, it’s crucial to note that 3CX takes pains to protect the privacy of your data. So things like call history and voicemails will always be under your control – this means you should create your own backup plan and save it outside of the instance.

This separation of data and operating system makes it easy for you to migrate your instance to a different hosting provider or even an on-premises system if you prefer. At the end of your free year’s hosting, it’s simple to migrate as you see fit. You’re always in control.

What’s next

After you have enjoyed a year’s free hosting, you can decide whether to stick with Hosted by 3CX or switch to an on-premises solution or your own choice of private cloud provider.

Hosting is offered for free for Standard, Pro and Enterprise licences, of all 3CX editions up to 32 simultaneous calls (SC). That means Hosted by 3CX is often the most cost-effective way of enjoying 3CX, with a 24SC Enterprise licence (for instance) costing £925 exc VAT on its own. Choose Hosted by 3CX and it costs a mere £300 per year.

It also means you don’t need to choose the Standard licence when you really want Pro, as the costs are the same no matter what. Instead, you only need to calculate how many simultaneous calls you need.

If you’re interested, new customers can simply select “Hosted by 3CX” while initiating their 3CX trial. Existing on-premise and private cloud installations can switch to 3CX’s hosted service directly from the customer portal – simply click on “Reinstall” under “My Subscriptions” and follow the steps.

Visit www.3cx.com/pbx/hosted to find out more

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Tonga’s submarine internet cable has been repaired, giving internet connectivity to the island nation once again.

A month ago the undersea volcano Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai erupted, causing a 1.2-metre tsunami wave to hit the nation. This damaged its submarine cable, the Tonga Cable, which was cut approximately 36km from the state.

Digicel, a local telco and minority stakeholder of the cable, confirmed this week that the undersea submarine cable has been repaired. It said that all its customers are connected to the outside world as data connectivity has been restored in the main island Tongatapu and Eua.

The company revealed that the cable had multiple faults and breaks due to volcanic activity and the submarine repair vessel worked for over two weeks to fix it. Although the international undersea cable between Tongatapu and Fiji has been repaired, restoring data connectivity to the outside world, the domestic cable is still down and there’s no communication in Vava’u, one of the nation’s island groups.

“We have learnt some tough lessons and we know how important internet connection is to our people. The recent incident has also provided the opportunity to our team to look at increased investment and network optimization to plan and prepare better for a catastrophic event of such nature in the future,” said Anthiny Seuseu, Digicel Tonga CEO.

Digicel added that it has set up a satellite line to restore connectivity for Ha’apai Island and it is working on trying to get Vava’u back online this week.

As Tonga aims to regain domestic connectivity, it also has to deal with the challenge of the pandemic. Three weeks ago, the country went into lockdown after recording two COVID-19 cases among port workers helping distribute international aid following the volcanic eruption, reported the Guardian.

Tongan officials had previously worried that the arrival of aid could bring an outbreak of the virus, especially since the island has remained free of it for much of the pandemic.

Tonga’s subsea internet cable has been damaged after a volcanic eruption, which could leave the island without internet access for "weeks".

The undersea Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano erupted on 15 January, causing a 1.2-metre tsunami wave to hit the island nation of Tonga. The volcano is located around 65km north of Tonga’s capital, Nuku'alofa.

Southern Cross Cable has confirmed in a Facebook post that the Tonga Cable has been cut approximately 36km from the island nation. It added that Tonga Cable Limited is working with Subcom, the South Pacific Maintenance authority, to arrange repairs.

Digicel, local telco and a minority stakeholder of the cable, confirmed that its customers in the country have experienced disruption in their mobile service too. It added that all communication to the outside world in Tonga is affected due to the damage to the Tonga Cable as a result of the volcanic eruption.

The company is working to get its satellite link connectivity which will be available to limited customers in essential services and government.

The repair is likely to be carried out by a cable laying vessel called the CS Reliance which is currently near the Papua New Guinea capital of Port Moresby, around 4,000km away, according to the NZ Herald. The ship is operated by Subcom which holds a maintenance contract covering 19 cable systems across the South Pacific.

“SubCom has a long-standing marine maintenance contract in the South Pacific region and is actively working with the customer to mobilise cable ship SubCom Reliance for the Tonga cable repairs, while evaluating crew and ship safety in the affected area," a spokesperson from the company told IT Pro.

Samiuela Fonua, Tonga Cable director, told the NZ Herald that the last cable cut took nearly two weeks to repair.

"This time, I am not sure yet because we have to take into account site conditions, the fact that the repair ship will be entering the Tongatapu waters not too far away from the eruption site - and if the volcano is still active."

Tonga currently has limited phone and internet access, as Fonua said that the dust cloud from the volcano was interrupting satellite communications.

New Zealand telcos Spark and Vodafone NZ are offering free mobile and landline calls to Tonga this week.

This isn’t the first time the Tonga Cable has been cut off from the internet, as in 2019 the undersea cable was severed twice, according to a ZDnet report. The island nation went without a working subsea cable for two weeks and had to rely on satellite providers for its internet connection. The 827km cable between Tonga and Fiji connects to the Southern Cross Cable that was launched in 2013, and was funded jointly by the Asian Development Bank and the World Bank.

Web chats, phone calls, Facebook Messenger, text messages, video: customers have a huge number of options when they need to reach out to a business, and your agents need to be on top of them all. The question is, how? The answer is to have a customer communication system that stretches from start to end, which is exactly what the latest update to 3CX provides.

Live chat is a powerful tool. What began as a handy way for web visitors to communicate with agents has evolved into a potent weapon that makes it easier for customers and your business alike, and with V18 of 3CX it’s become even more powerful.

Facebook feedback

Facebook is one of the main ways that people interact with businesses, but often that Facebook page hurts a firm’s reputation more than it helps – what do you think when you see “usually responds in three days” on the page?

With 3CX Facebook and Live Chat integration you can save time, increase customer satisfaction and boost conversions. Connecting with customers is easy – messages are delivered immediately to both web client and smartphone apps, so agents can answer, transfer and resolve customer queries from the same platform they use for all other communication.

3CX’s Facebook integration means there’s no need to give multiple agents access to your Facebook page. Simply complete the integration with your Facebook account, assign incoming chats to a specific queue, and your agents can respond as they would a live chat, without ever opening the Facebook app or being granted admin permissions.

Business text messages

In his YouTube video announcing what’s new with 3CX V18, CTO and Founder Nick Galea had a simple message. “A clear trend is that customers are reaching out to businesses more and more via text,” he said. “It turns out 89% want to be able to text the business and use different platforms to do so,” citing a Twilio survey, including good old SMS.

However, less than half of businesses have a mechanism to handle text messages. Even if they do, it’s unlikely to be integrated into their existing system. This adds confusion, time delays and costs more as you have to pay for two or more systems running in parallel. Worse still, you can’t move live chat conversations across to the call centre.

Businesses need a single, integrated solution that allows the same teams to handle both messaging and calls – and have just one system to administer and pay for. Most importantly, they can close requests faster by elevating a message to a call if needed. While people want to reach out via text, they frequently need voice communication to describe an issue or have the solution explained.

With the 3CX mobile apps for iOS and Android, users can send and receive instant text messages via a designated business phone number, without giving out their personal mobile number. Incoming text messages can be assigned to queues so there’s no relying on a single agent to respond, so no message goes unanswered.

Response rates will increase as rapidly as your customer service satisfaction: answer incoming messages, send out appointment reminders, and use SMS marketing to boost business and drive customer engagement. It takes just minutes to set up in the 3CX Management Console.

Free WordPress plugin

Let’s not forget website visitors. The 3CX Live Chat plugin for WordPress turns visitors into leads, instantly connecting them with your customer service team.

From the admin console, you can easily add agents, customise your live chat box, and configure the behaviour of the chat function on your website to suit your business needs. You can install and set up the live chat plugin in minutes to offer customers a hassle-free way to get in touch in real time with your team.

What’s more, agents can help customers find what they need, answer questions and upsell products or services – just like they would on the shop floor. With more than 1.9 million downloads worldwide, 3CX Live Chat is the most popular live-chat plugin for WordPress. Plus, the plugin can be fully integrated with 3CX, so you can manage your entire communications suite from one easy-to-manage central platform.

And for those times when customer problems or queries are best resolved via voice, the minimised chat bubble now presents a “call us” option right at the start of the customer journey. This is ideal for website visitors who want to jump right in and talk with an agent. With V18, 3CX is also adding support for its Live Chat bubble for several new content management systems – including Drupal, Joomla, Shopify, Weebly and Wix.

Greater analytics

The final gift in the 3CX V18 Live Chat package is for managers. Using Google Analytics, you can now track and report your website visitors’ interactions, in turn helping to improve conversion rates.

Websites already set up to use Google Analytics can now track how visitors interact with the chat bubble and greeting message, allowing you to hone your message and improve results. You can see all the data you need about chat sessions, and even check on the successful delivery of offline messages. It’s also easier to check what images agents have sent, with a preview of the attachment, while a number of enhancements behind the scenes improve both performance and security.

Updates are coming

Not content with all the live chat improvements that arrived with V18, 3CX has numerous plans to improve the service still further via its frequent feature updates. “First off, we’ll support new Google messaging,” said Galea. “This appears on search on Google Maps and allows customers to reach out to you.”

3CX will also be adding support for Apple iMessage and MMS messaging. And you will soon be able to dispatch a one-way SMS with alphanumeric sender ID – this is popular across Europe for customer notifications, making it easier to track shipments, for example.

And there’s more

The 3CX Live Chat will be upgraded so users can directly state which department they want to speak to, and people will be able to provide instant chat ratings. That leads to better reports to help you evaluate the performance of your agents, wherever they’re working.

3CX can already smoothly integrate with countless CRM systems, from Freshdesk to Zendesk, from Salesforce to Microsoft Dynamics, but an update will embed live chats into the CRM software and not only display the conversation as it happens but show you which web page the customer is currently visiting. All of this provides greater insight that will allow your agents to understand exactly who the customer is and what they want. Finally, agents will be able to email the customer a complete transcript, send them a response to their Facebook account or fire over an SMS.

Existing customers benefit from all these upgrades as part of their package, and if you’re new to 3CX you can try it for free for a year – no strings attached. Just visit the address below and pick the right solution for your team.

Try 3CX free for one year

Slack has doubled down on its 'digital HQ' plans with the launch of new features to help any user customise their workflow, no matter their technical prowess.

At its Frontiers conference this week, Slack said it had "completely rebuilt and re-engineered" its communications platform from the ground up in a bid to empower users to make work life simpler and more productive.

This includes automated and no code functions that enable organisations to tailor their Slack app to suit. The idea of a 'virtual HQ' is to place a common space (a digital one) at the heart of a dispersed workforce, but like a physical office, Slack is implementing ways to change its platform to suit an organisation.

"Just like no two businesses run the same, no two digital HQs are alike," the company said. "Teams need the ability to tailor solutions based on their unique business needs and we're on a mission to make that happen.

"In fact, we've already seen thousands of organisations like Noom use Workflow Builder to automate routine onboarding tasks and offer essential resources to new hires, saving time while achieving 100% new-hire engagement."

The Workflow Builder is a core element of the new Slack platform, which allows users to automate work for themselves and other members of their team - all without the need to write code. The key here is that anyone within the organisation can create a workflow in Slack, simply by dragging and dropping existing apps and customising the way they work to suit. According to Slack, since Workflow Builder launched, more than 400,000 users have built workflows, with 80% of customers building workflows in their digital HQs being non-developers.

The communication platform also revealed 'Sign in with Slack links', which is set to be released next year. This allows users to seamlessly connect their tools using Slack account information. There's also 'Subscribe in Slack', a tool to add notifications from other third-party apps that are integrated into a user's Slack workspace.

Slack-first app deployment will let developers host and store the data that powers their apps in Slack and be able to attach "invisible metadata' to their messages. The benefit here is that other apps will be able to communicate with each other via Slack; for example, the different calendar apps of two people at two different companies can directly talk to each other and schedule a meeting through Slack when they're linked through Slack Connect.

"Everyday Slack users can now build and automate workflows for their teams without leaning on IT or writing any code. For developers, not only are they now free to focus on more interesting work, we've cut their deployment time down from days to minutes," said Steve Wood, Slack's VP of product, developer platform

There are also new additions for Slack Connect, the platform's external communication feature. Coming early next year, users will be able to collaborate with up to 250 organisations in one channel. And, later in the year, customers will have the ability to set up secure work environments for large, complex projects with thousands of partners right in Slack.

"Whether you're planning a large-scale event like Dreamforce with hundreds of vendors or managing a multi-year construction project spanning thousands of vendors, everyone has access to the channels, apps and people needed to get their jobs done," Slack said. "This gives teams a monumental leap forward in collaboration, flexibility and control."

For more than two decades, the humble blog has been something of an unsung hero in the world of business communications. Most companies have one as a notice board, but there are some, like fitness specialist Freeletics, that use a blog to offer more value for customers.

Freeletics, a popular fitness app created in 2013 by three students in Germany – Joshua Cornelius, Andrej Matijczak and Mehmet Yilmaz – didn’t actually start as an app at all. In its first incarnation, it consisted of simple exercise tutorials posted to YouTube that were supported with a weekly newsletter. It was also published in PDF format, with all training carried out in the Munich Maßmannpark. Eight years on, however, it’s now a global multimedia app used by more than 32 million people across 160 different countries.

It took two migrations to get to that point, though, with the PDFs quickly evolving into an encyclopedic blog, with over five thousand posts in ten different languages on the WordPress platform. The blog has remained a key element of Freeletics, with articles covering nutrition, wellbeing and exercise. But as its popularity grew around the world it became harder and harder to manage, Szymon Nowak, the company’s engineering manager, tells IT Pro.

From the slow process of translating multiple articles from German, to the limited tools at their disposal, the Freeletics editorial team was crying out for a better CMS. In particular, it needed more consistency for the visual aspects of the blogs, where typography, images and video embeds were becoming increasingly important additions.

“That’s why we decided to migrate our blog from WordPress to a headless CMS,” Nowak explains. “Initially, we migrated all our content to Contentful and used Gatsby.js for generating the blog website. However, after a while, we realised that we needed more advanced features that Contentful didn’t provide, such as scheduled releases or workflows. Thus, we decided to switch again, this time to Contentstack.

“Since then, we’ve started using Contentstack for more than just our blog. At the moment, it’s providing content for almost all of our main websites, and also some parts of our mobile apps. Contentstack’s flexibility also allowed us to integrate it with some third-party services, like translation services that we use and our internal systems.”

Unlike a traditional CMS, where the content controls are combined with the presentation layer, a headless CMS is essentially decoupled from the end result and simply comprises the content element. It requires a stateless API to present the content, or in the case of Freeletics, multiple APIs; its content is managed in the headless CMS and from there it is sent to different platforms, such as the mobile app or the website.

The benefits of a headless CMS can mostly be labelled as ‘flexibility’, because it can be tailored to fit developer needs and offers seemingly limitless scalability. For Freeletics it also provided a faster editorial process and vastly improved operational efficiency.

The real key for the company, however, was Contentstack’s automated translation services. Translating content from the company’s native German into the nine other languages it offers previously took around four weeks. According to Contentstack’s metrics, this process can be reduced to under one week, enabling an 80% reduction of time to market. The company further claims that developer productivity actually went from around 22.5 days to just four and a half, on average, an 85% increase.

While website builders like WordPress, with all their innovative plugins and widgets, have helped many businesses build their online presence, they can’t match the flexibility and scalability of a headless CMS. However, this also comes with the burden of more technical responsibility, depending on which service you use. In the case of Freeletics, a little more effort has resulted in multiple gains, and it still hasn’t reached its upper limits.

3CX never stops iterating and making improvements to its software. This year’s big release, V18, puts customer communication front and centre. Consider it as an all-in-one, integrated solution to communicate internally and connect with prospects – via voice, live chat or video.

Teams integration

If you don’t relish the thought of determining exactly which of Microsoft’s licensing tiers to choose from, or indeed configuring Teams, then 3CX V18 may well be the answer. It natively supports Microsoft Teams – and is easy to use, too. With the Microsoft Teams phone system integration, users can call out via 3CX SIP trunks, taking advantage of low-cost domestic and international tariffs offered by your local SIP provider.

There are advantages for users, too, not least of which is the seamless unified calling experience both for 3CX users dialling Teams users and for Teams users who can dial out through an interface they are already familiar with.

Just as importantly, administrators can benefit from a full-featured PBX. This includes contact centre features such as advanced call queues, reporting, call routing and more.

Sound improvements

What else is new in V18? As ever, the focus is on giving users the best-in-class audio quality, performance and reliability, with V18 benefiting from extensive changes behind the scenes to improve audio quality, improve reconnection and strengthen security.

Over Wi-Fi, the mobile apps and web client now use the G.711 audio codec, which provides uncompressed audio and also reduces the need for transcoding. Of course, this isn’t a sensible option on mobile networks, which is why the app then switches to G.729 and its lower bandwidth.

For patchy reception areas, 3CX V18 benefits from yet faster recovery if and when the network drops.

A+ for security

3CX V18 also brings improved security thanks to an update to Debian 10, which uses the latest .NET core, OpenSSL and Postgres – and now has the latest ciphers. Knocking out the competition on security, 3CX achieved A+ on Qualys labs and A on Immunilabs.

If you’re worried about digital eavesdroppers, don’t be. Users now benefit from easier encryption for calls thanks to the secure real-time transport protocol (SRTP). This also provides message authentication, confidentiality and replay protection.

New Windows app

Good news for Windows users: with V18, 3CX has introduced a native Windows Desktop App, making it even easier to pin the softphone to your taskbar.

The new Desktop App uses the same Electron framework used by Teams and WhatsApp, integrating better with the OS for a more reliable user experience. The Desktop App allows you to answer a call from the page you’re working in (for example, your CRM) without having to switch between apps.

Improved mobile apps

3CX aims to make the remote-working experience as seamless as possible. Part of this is the improvement to audio mentioned above, whether that’s the lossless codec or slick reconnection when the network changes or drops.

3CX has been collaborating with both Google and Apple to improve the reliability of push notifications, and iOS users can now tell Siri to make calls using 3CX.

Finally, 3CX V18 adds support for Bluetooth and hands-free devices.

How to get V18

V18 is already available for Linux, self-hosted in the cloud (through Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Lightsail, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure) and via your choice of managed host. You can even install it on a Raspberry Pi 4. A version for Windows will be available shortly.

If your 3CX instance is hosted by 3CX, then you will have automatically been upgraded to V18 and can take advantage of the new features straight away. It’s yet another reason to choose this hassle-free option.

New to 3CX? Free of charge, 3CX provides a 4SC contract (where 4SC stands for four simultaneous calls) that are suitable for up to 12 users on all versions: Standard, Pro and Enterprise. The offer is available with no charge for a minimum of one year, depending on its success.

Try 3CX free for one year

The telephone network that we’ve relied on for decades is coming to an end. The UK’s public switched telephone network (PSTN) is being shut down in 2025, and traditional telephony products will stop being sold in as little as 18 months’ time.

The closure puts on notice everything from your home landline to the office phone system, from burglar alarms to traffic lights. They’ll all need to be migrated to digital technology within the next few years or they’ll stop working. ISDN lines are another casualty.

We’ve spoken to the person responsible for managing the switch-off and other industry experts to find out precisely what effect this will have on businesses – and why you need to start planning now for the great British switch-off.

What’s being switched off?

Although the switch-off hasn’t been widely publicised yet, there’s already some confusing, contradictory and wrong information being distributed about what’s being switched off, so let’s try and get to the bottom of it.

By far the most critical pieces of infrastructure to go are the phone lines. By 2025, every phone line in the country will be IP-based, instead of running over the traditional PSTN. That means the landline phone plugged into the wall will be redundant by 2025 (although some communications providers may offer workarounds, which we’ll come to).

The shutdown won’t only affect phone systems; it’s also going to affect any piece of tech that relies on a traditional phone line, including emergency phones in lifts, panic alarms, information displays, door-entry systems, CCTV and EPOS payment terminals.

“It’s a pretty big challenge,” says James Lilley, director of managed customer migrations at Openreach, who is overseeing the switch-off. “There are all sorts of what we call ‘economy special services’ that hang off that network,” he adds, referring to the devices fitted with telephone lines mentioned above. “They’re the ones that probably give us the biggest challenge in terms of migration and moving them over the coming years.”

Hanging up on the landline

Before we get onto that compendium of tech that hangs off the PSTN, let’s deal with telephones themselves. For home customers, James Lilley says that the providers currently supplying phone and internet services will deliver solutions to allow customers to keep using their existing handsets.

“What we’re seeing most communications providers do now is include analogue converters in their [internet] hubs,” he says. “So, you can take that same handset, and instead of plugging it into the wall, you plug it in the back of your router. Essentially, that will convert you to digital voice over the router.” Existing telephone numbers will be ported to a new VoIP system.

Business telephone systems, however, are a great deal more complicated than home landlines, and few companies have much expertise and experience in upgrading and managing them. After all, it’s perfectly likely that many small businesses had a PBX installed a decade or two ago and have barely touched it since. Some telephone systems will still be based on ISDN lines, which are also facing the chop in 2025.

Research conducted by Zen Internet shows that 72% of businesses are reliant on traditional telephony, more so in large enterprises. Yet the research also found that a third of SMEs were unaware of the future switch-off, with 17% of large businesses still in the dark.

Alex Bloor, general manager at Andrews & Arnold (A&A), says that the PSTN switch-off is a good opportunity for businesses to take advantage of the benefits that IP telephony brings – indeed, most of his company’s customers already have. “Our customers are either businesses with phones on desks, in which case they typically want something designed for purpose – and there are some really great, fairly cheap VoIP handsets by companies like Snom,” he says.

“Or, we have customers who put one of our SIP2SIM cards in a mobile phone,” he adds. SIP2SIM basically allows a customer to insert a SIM card in any mobile phone (not even necessarily a smartphone) and have it work like an office phone that’s tied to your desk. When you call out from the phone, it appears with the firm’s geographical “landline” number.

Zen Internet’s Jon Perkins says the company has stopped selling traditional telephony products to business customers, and is focusing on helping them prepare for the switch. “We’re signalling what’s coming and when, and giving them solutions,” he says. “And we’re often taking a bit of a margin hit, so we’re investing ahead of time to avoid what could be a much bigger risk. There’s a [cost] incentive to move customers off traditional copper-based voice services onto digital.”

That incentive applies to the company’s customers too, says Perkins, with customers able to buy a chunk of call minutes much more cheaply than traditional phone tariffs. “You generally save a lot of money [on calls],” he says.

As for ISDN, that was already a diminishing force in businesses, and the events of the past 18 months have given it a further shove towards obsolescence. Perkins describes his company as “exhibit A” for such a migration, having moved from an ISDN call centre to a hosted VoIP platform when its 200 customer support staff suddenly had to start working from home. “Lots of other call centres and colleagues in the telecoms industry have shared the same experience,” he adds.

ISDN’s diminishing customer base means it will barely be a problem in 2025, but there’s one area where it’s stubbornly clinging to life, and that’s in the “specials” market such as bus shelters, traffic lights and other utility devices that are going to prove more stubborn to shift.

The long tail

This brings us to those hard-to-budge devices we mentioned earlier: the burglar alarms, lift phones, panic alarms, traffic lights and all those other devices that rely on an old-fashioned phone line to call home.

Openreach’s Lilley admits that this huge swathe of non-telephony devices is going to pose the biggest challenge, but measures are in place to ensure a smooth migration. “We’ve got people coming into the tent now from a lot of trade bodies, representing a lot of the industries that use this network – like the alarm industry, the water industry and some of the utilities,” he explains. “They’re increasingly working with us to make sure that they’re messaging out to their suppliers the need to make sure that their equipment is compatible with IP.”

Lilley admits that “there will come a point in time where we need to switch this network off and, if customers haven’t migrated, there will be some tough choices to make”.

“The key thing is when we look at the critical stuff like health pendants, for example… they’re the ones we really, really need to make sure as an industry that we’re identifying and having the right migration policies and support in place for in the coming years.”

Some industries are better prepared than others. Barry Forsyth owns alarms business InstallSmart and points out that his industry has already migrated many alarm systems to either cellular or IP-based systems. “If your alarm was fitted by an accredited installer, they should have been proactive and upgraded those systems to a different signalling path,” he says.

However, he acknowledges that there will still be instances where business owners have ignored messages urging them to upgrade, or where alarm fitters have gone out of business. He’s particularly concerned about fire alarms, as there could obviously be life-or-death implications if they’re not upgraded before PSTN is switched off.

At the same time, Forsyth warns consumers and businesses to be wary of alarm companies using the PSTN switch-off as an excuse to sell an entire new alarm system when only the control box needs replacing. “I can’t think of a product that wouldn’t be upgradable [to cellular or IP signalling],” he says.

One solution for many products still relying on PSTN is similar to what will happen with domestic phone lines – an analogue telephone adapter (ATA) will be used to connect them to the digital network. “I suspect we’ll see a lot of emergency panic-button pendants hastily plugged into ATAs with weeks to spare until the deadline in 2025, and some will work and some might not,” says A&A’s Alex Bloor.

Inevitably, there will be some legacy products that haven’t been upgraded when the switch is finally flicked in 2025. “I strongly suspect there will be cases when someone gets trapped in a lift and stuck there all night… or when an old person trips over and presses the button, and nothing happens,” says Bloor.

“We may well hear some of these stories, but on the other hand, I wouldn’t use that as a stick to beat up BT with. Ultimately, we all knew that the days of PSTN were numbered when VoIP really started to take hold. It’s just one of those things. It’s been a hundred years, for goodness’ sake!”

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IT channel businesses are “cautiously optimistic” as they refocus on growth opportunities in 2021 and beyond, according to the latest research from CompTIA.

The non-profit association, a voice and advocate for the IT industry and its workforce, has released its ‘International State of the Channel 2021' report, which surveyed 880 global IT channel professionals during the second quarter.

It found that nine in 10 executives believe the channel maintains its relevance in the IT industry – but they were split when asked about its health. According to the report, 46% said it’s holding steady, while 44% said it is rapidly changing.

"This latter attitude is most likely based on the expanding fabric of the channel, with new business models unleased by cloud computing, the ubiquity of consulting-only services and the emergence of non-traditional players as purveyors of technology products and services," explained Carolyn April, CompTIA’s senior director for industry analysis.

Asked about the steps they’re taking to maintain relevance, executives said consultative selling aligned with changing customer demographics and buying behaviours was a top priority. They are also looking to create a competitive differentiator, increase investments in marketing, as well as improve marketing efforts, the report found.

Those surveyed predicted positive revenue potential over the next two years from a variety of service offerings. Cyber security topped the list, cited by 69% of respondents, followed by cloud services (68%), data analytics (68%), digital marketing services (66%), and emerging technologies (66%).

CompTIA also found that standard offerings such as antivirus, firewall and data backup protection are standard for most channel companies (53%) delivering cybersecurity services. However, 36% said they are only just beginning to formulate a cybersecurity strategy and portfolio, are behind schedule or not involved at all.

In terms of vendor-partner relationships, although channel companies’ satisfaction with their vendors remains high, it’s not as high as in the past. The report revealed a net 79% said they were either satisfied or very satisfied with their vendors in the last two years.

This cautious optimism in the industry is mirrored by forecasts that tip global IT spending to top $5 trillion this year, based on the assumption that customer will resume their spending on IT products and services.

However, executives acknowledge that some customers may still be reluctant to buy - including small businesses and industry sectors hit hardest by the pandemic such as hospitality and retail.

“Four in 10 executives express concern about the continuing impact of COVID-19 on customers' ability or willingness to invest in new technology solutions,” the CompTIA report revealed.

For many businesses, the COVID-19 pandemic has completely transformed the way we work, with effects that are expected to persist long after all restrictions on movement and social contact have been lifted. In 2020, many people found themselves having to work from home every day, some for the first time in their careers.

While there are various negatives associated with not being able to work in an office or other shared space, this period has also demonstrated the benefits of home working. Thus, UK businesses are expected to maintain remote-working options, leading to a hybrid-working model which will see a mix of home and office working, and which will emphasise not where or how the work is done but its efficiency and effectiveness.

Two key factors in ensuring that these hybrid-working systems are effective are communication and employee experience (EX). Clear lines of communication are vital to ensure that colleagues can stay aligned with business priorities and with each other to ensure that they’re all moving in the same direction, can ask questions and engage with their leaders, and can create and maintain a community within their organisation.

EX goes a step beyond this to look at the sense of belonging a member of staff has to the wider organisation throughout their time with the business. It comprises a series of actions, techniques and strategies that help employees create a deeper sense of connection to their work, their colleagues and the company as a whole. In a working culture where colleagues might never see each other face to face or occupy the physical space of an office or headquarters, developing and maintaining a strong EX strategy and the right tools to ensure they all employees are engaged with will become one of the key challenges of the hybrid working future..

Workplace from Facebook is a communication tool that offers a way to build and maintain EX in your organisation and to empower leaders to better connect with their teams as a group and as individuals. With features like Groups, Chat, Rooms, live video broadcasting and a Knowledge Library where relevant content like workstation setup guides and HR policies can be created, stored and shared – all of which can integrate with your existing tools – it offers a simple, intuitive way to keep your organisation connected, from one-to-one and team chats to company-wide communications.

Workplace has outlined three new rules of engagement to help foster EX across your business:

New rule #1: Create more efficient employee communication

With new distributed-working models meaning that employees will rarely occupy the same physical space – and that some may rarely or never visit the office – businesses may have to work more actively to maintain clear and open lines of communication than they have in the past. For effective EX, you have to make sure that the right people have access to the right information wherever they are based, and that any communications can be just as easily accessed by anyone in the business to avoid siloing. This is particularly true of frontline workers, a group that has historically been hard to engage with because the communication platforms being used often don’t include them.

Particularly in times of uncertainty, clear and transparent communication is a must. Leadership should be willing to openly discuss the issues – even if it doesn’t have all the answers, employees expect consistent, authentic communication and will be more reassured by candour than equivocation.

In turn, employees must be given open lines of communication to feed back on how they feel about the direction and functioning of the company, and must be reassured that they are being listened to. In a hybrid-working system, this will prove just as valuable to leadership, creating an avenue for insights and ideas on everything from working practices to customer experience which might previously have been shared casually in the office.

Workplace’s live video function integrates seamlessly with existing business tools to create fast and accessible department- or company-wide communications from a laptop or phone straight out of the box, without the need for assistance from your IT team. It can be used for panel discussions or town halls, with features including live Q&A and automatic captioning to ensure that all participants can properly engage and participate. It also offers post-broadcast stats that will allow you to assess the performance of the communication and to adjust and improve future sessions.

The Queensland Police Service is a very large organisation, with about 16,000 staff members spread across a large geographic area. It has a very hierarchical structure with ten ranks from constable to commissioner, and communication between ranks has proven a challenge in the past.

“I really wanted to cut through those layers in the organisation,” says Katarina Carroll APM, commissioner of police, Queensland Police. “So Workplace came at a time when I desperately needed to change the way we operate, the way that we engage and the way we communicate. It also came at a time when we were responding to COVID.

“We could have held off, but I actually saw an opportunity to use it in getting our message out through COVID.” Workplace allowed Queensland Police to communicate the rapidly changing situation very quickly and to engage with the entire organisation at all levels. “[It also enabled] junior staff to ask questions constantly in an area that was legally changing all the time,” Carroll continues. The ability to use Workforce on mobile devices was vital for the dispersed police force.

During the height of the first wave of the pandemic, Carroll used Workforce to hold regular virtual meetings with the entire organisation. “Never in the past would you ever have a commissioner go onto a virtual conference with her officers,” she says, “but I have cut through five or six rank levels in our organisation.” She found that those who previously struggled to communicate across the ranks have particularly enjoyed these interactions. “Workplace has really allowed us to transform how we communicate and engage in the organisation.”

New rule #2: Build community

Community and personal interactions are an important part of the working environment and EX that have been seriously curtailed by the pandemic. When working across a hybrid team, it’s easy to feel isolated and siloed, so companies need to take an active role to empower people to work together and develop their sense of belonging across dispersed networks.

For employees to feel truly engaged, they need to feel that they are part of a community, working together with shared values towards a common goal, no matter their position in the business. This is particularly important for new recruits, who might not have the opportunity to meet their team and members of the wider business face to face as they would have done before the pandemic. And while communicating on business matters is vital, it’s important not to neglect the social element of our work relationships, which may have suffered particularly under our new working model.

Workplace’s Groups feature is a great way to foster these lines of communication. These secure shared spaces offer a simple and easy way for employees to engage with their colleagues, whether they are collaborating on business projects or discussing shared interests. Groups can be used for everything from keeping employees informed about business announcements to helping them build the social connections necessary for a community.

An awareness of diversity and inclusion (D&I) issues is also important for building a work community. No matter their background or identity, employees need to understand that they are being seen, heard and valued. A diversity of thought and experience on different business matters often leads to greater insight and innovation. Groups is a great way for organisations to bring people together to discuss their shared identities and experiences, fostering communication and community.

New rule #3: Put wellbeing first

We’re only just beginning to understand the impact that the pandemic has had on our mental and physical wellbeing. Working from home has meant that people need to make a conscious effort to keep physically active, and it has been much harder for organisations to assess and maintain employee working environments. According to an Oracle study, 78% of workers also say that the pandemic has negatively affected their mental health. Boundaries between work and home life are frequently at risk of blurring, and employers have had to consider how to support staff from afar.

A key strategy is to empower employees to be aware of the risks and issues and to educate themselves to identify and mitigate threats to their wellbeing. Toolkits and wellness programmes can offer simple and straightforward advice to workers, from how to optimise their home-working environment to identifying and combating the stresses that can contribute to burnout, and putting aside time to communicate with colleagues on non-work-related matters. To ensure that such tools and information are easily accessible, features like Workplace’s Knowledge Library are an ideal way to collate information and place it at employees’ fingertips whenever they need it. Knowledge Library’s search function is simple and reliable to use, and it’s quick and easy to build and customise content on Workplace.

For global food and agriculture business Olam International, Workplace has been a key tool for ensuring clear and open lines of communication between its 87,000 full-time, seasonal and contract employees during the pandemic. “Through our pulse checks, we’ve also identified that there were two major areas of concern for employees,” says Dev Sarkar, vice president, group head of internal communications at Olam. “One was wellness and the other was productivity. So we ran themed monthly campaigns to address these areas. For example, August was a wellness month, and we curated a lot of content internally and externally to meet this need, including hosting live sessions with experts on things like yoga, wellness, mindfulness etc.

“It would have been impossible to imagine how we would have communicated in this pandemic if we didn’t have Workplace,” he continues, “and how we would keep engagement and people together across the 60-odd countries that we’re in.”

Workplace can help your organisation to abide by these rules, creating clearer channels of communication and bolstering EX by ensuring that employees feel connected and are properly supported and supplied with the information they need to work effectively and happily. Rollout is simple and Workplace integrates with existing tools and platforms to create a communication platform fit for the post-pandemic, hybrid-working future.

Learn more about Workplace platform and its benefits

Imagine for a moment that you’re visiting your company’s website. You like what you see and are interested in the products or services on sale. But you quickly run into difficulties in accessing them, which is where many undecided visitors will give up and close the browser window.

The mistake companies repeatedly make is to add barriers to customers’ purchases. They create friction where there doesn’t need to be any. But there are solutions to help remove this friction so that you can turn visitors into customers.

What are the blockers?

Blockers are the hurdles that can stop visitors in their tracks. On a desktop site, it could be as simple as not knowing where to go next, or when clicking onto a “products” page provides a lot of options that aren’t clear.

How do you solve this? As consumers, we have become used to a chat window opening up on the bottom right of a window to connect us to agents. This is almost a tick-box feature now, and if you don’t offer visitors an easy way to communicate then you have found your first blocker. With more than half of web traffic on smartphones, it’s vital you make this just as obvious on mobile browsers.

From the IT team perspective, the things that have blocked you from integrating a chat service could be a combination of expense and perceived difficulty. Maybe you looked at the options from your current supplier, or a new one, and decided they were just too much hassle to implement. Fortunately, there are simple and affordable ways to add sophisticated chat services to your website.

A single solution

One of the mistakes that businesses make when choosing communication platforms is to silo the different elements. That can be especially problematic now, when so many companies have a distributed workforce and employees are as likely to be working from their home office as from central headquarters.

Instead, everything needs to link together smoothly. Your ideal should be to have one supplier, which means you’ll avoid the blame game if something goes wrong.

What are these different elements? Here, at a basic level, are your traditional phone system, chat tools and video calls. When a customer visits your website and clicks on the chat tool, you want to ensure that your agents can escalate to a voice call and even a video call if that will better serve the customer – not everyone wants to type endless messages into a box.

To fulfil this, you need those three platforms to be rolled into one. 3CX not only integrates with customer-facing parts of your business such as your website, but is also the communication tool for all of your workforce.

As one of the most powerful marketing tools around, it also makes sense to treat Facebook in the same way as your regular site from a communication point of view. You want a system that can transform a hot Facebook lead into a customer as quickly as possible. And that means integrating it with your chat/call/video service.

Easy to implement

Not only must your choice of communications platform be easy to use from each customer’s perspective, but it must also be easy for agents to use. That means working on both their smartphone and their desk phone in the office.

It also means the software needs to be “one click” intuitive. You want to make it easy for agents to escalate a chat from text to voice and from voice to video, and it needs to be easy on every platform – if they’re sitting on a PC with a headset, if they’re on a tablet or if they’re handling calls on a smartphone.

Another potential area of major friction is ease of implementation. With 3CX, integration with your website could be as easy as adding a WordPress plugin, but it can also be integrated with a custom-made CMS.

3CX is simple to implement as a system. You can host it yourself on premises, opt for a private cloud with your choice of provider, or 3CX can host it for you. With 3CX, one simple licence covers chat, voice, video and more – and you can try it free for one year, no strings attached.

No silos

One of the common frustrations for customers is repeating information and speaking to a different agent who doesn’t know their history. You can bypass all this by putting all the information you have about a customer into one place, so that any agent can access it.

3CX integrates with customer relationship management (CRM) software, supporting all the popular CRM and help desk packages, whether that’s Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, Outlook, Zendesk, HubSpot, Zoho or many more.

With your chosen CRM integrated, your agents can see exactly who is calling before they pick up their phone, with the customer’s record open and ready. You can call customers directly from your CRM package too, so agents never need to shift from one software interface to another, while automatic call-journaling removes the tedium of manual call entries.

It doesn’t need to be difficult to implement a frictionless communication system. From a customer’s point of view, their journey will be seamless, whether they decide to stay in the website chat box or end up on a video call.

From your employees’ point of view, the same journey applies. Whether they’re the original person taking the call or an expert pulled in to answer a tough question (one-to-one video chats can be escalated to group chats if necessary), they will have access to all the information they need.

From an IT department’s viewpoint, this is all one system using one, simple licensing model. They can take as much control as they like – down to a bespoke self-hosted approach that ties in with a custom-made CMS – or they can outsource to 3CX or one of its partners to host it all.

Learn more about 3CX’s services

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Salesforce has secured a high profile partnership with Disney Content Studios which will use the platform to support marketers and filmmakers for both streaming and theatrical content.

The cost of the deal has not been disclosed, or the length of the partnership, but Disney's StudioLAB will use technology from the Salesforce Customer 360 suite, which includes apps for marketing and commerce.

The deal will initially focus on streamlining production and marketing by developing digital workflows, performance analysis to inform 'executive decision-making', and the deployment of software that allows studio personnel to access workflows from any device.

Disney's StudioLAB is a unit dedicated to finding and deploying new technologies for storytelling. Its team is compromised of software engineers, film producers, theme park designers, and game developers, and its partners already include the likes of Microsoft, HPE and LG.

With Salesforce onboard, StudioLAB will also explore the use of technology to manage and accelerate content production with both companies collaborating on content from its initial conception all the way through to post-production, according to Disney.

"Salesforce's platform gives us the ability to accelerate and better coordinate the production process," said Jamie Voris, the chief technology officer for Disney Studios Content. "With Salesforce as our Innovation Partner, we can equip our marketers and storytellers with world-class technology to better deliver against the incredible slate of content we have planned for streaming and theatrical audiences."

Disney is set for a strong finish to the year with a host of films and shows set to be released in both cinemas and on its streaming platform Disney+. To manage this the company has secured partnerships with the world's largest cloud companies, including a deal with AWS to help push Disney+ into more regions across the globe.

When most companies talk about unified communications, they’re usually referring to within the company itself. 3CX is focused on a different type of unified communications: one where it connects you to customers in a friction-free environment. An environment that means your sales team and support team can focus on the things that matter.

3CX is fast becoming an “omnidirectional” communication system, recognising that busy customers no longer just want to pick up a phone to get in touch as they did in the past – instead, they want to connect via live chat, SMS and Facebook at a time that’s convenient for them. That’s been especially true during the pandemic, where households have often been juggling homeworking with facilitating homeschooling.

Luckily, 3CX rolls all of these contact methods into one affordable and user-friendly system – one that’s becoming more fully featured with every new release. Not only will the core system be more efficient in v18, but the update also brings a host of customer-sourced tweaks (see “Your ideas made real”) alongside major improvements to the apps.

Core workout

Of course, all of the useful bells and whistles would be for naught if the core system couldn’t keep up with them. Consequently, 3CX v18 will introduce a major OS upgrade, with the ISO now deploying Debian 10 (or “Buster”) , while changes to the media server have improved call audio quality, trimmed memory consumption by 20% and sped up reconnect times.

The v18 update will also smooth the management and deployment processes to reflect the changing times. For example, users will no longer need to specify the remote or local IP address when accessing the web client or apps – something that will appeal to homeworkers who want to get started as quickly as possible.

Another feature makes the most of an endlessly versatile piece of computing kit: the Raspberry Pi. 3CX resellers can already provision a Raspberry Pi as an SBC or PBX and ship it to a customer, but v18 means they can deploy the units remotely. The customer doesn’t even need to hook up a keyboard or monitor to install 3CX!

Dropping in for a chat

Not all live chat boxes are created equal. We’ve all experienced clunkily designed and irritating pop-ups on, say, retailers’ websites. These can be an instant turn-off for customers, driving them to look elsewhere for help or to spend their money.

Not so with 3CX: v18 will see the company concentrate on making its live chat and messaging functions the very best they can be. That includes adding more themes to make the live chat box itself more attractive, ensuring that the collection of customer details is as hassle-free as possible and making the process more configurable to suit your needs.

Secret meeting

With more and more meetings taking place online rather than face-to-face, it’s key that they’re secure as possible. After all, information shared online or with remote parties is more vulnerable to attack or leaks.

On launch, v18 will help give you and your customers peace of mind: the WebMeeting portal is now hosted on your 3CX instance, meaning that all of your meeting data – including any potentially sensitive shared documents such as sales pitches or presentations – will be stored locally and, therefore, be confidential.

App upgrades

Alongside v18 development, 3CX’s Android and iOS videoconferencing apps have been given a major refresh and now offer features that were previously only available via the web client.

The two apps now share a codebase, making them more interoperable, and 3CX aims to make videoconferencing a richer, more collaborative experience by adding support for PDF viewing and participant polls, as well as adding the ability to view an online whiteboard and draw on it.

But the new additions don’t end there. 3CX has also introduced new badges and notifications in the chat box, added a “raise hand” function to add more order to proceedings, and call participants can now switch between their phone’s front and rear cameras if, say, they need to show something to the group.

The app interface has received a lick of paint: you can now hide certain functions for users without the appropriate permissions, screen sharing has been enhanced with a picture-in-picture (PiP) view for the meeting leader or presenter, and aspect ratios have been improved for various mobile devices.

Your ideas made real

Many companies pay lip service to listening to their customers; 3CX delivers. A lively Ideas forum on its website (www.3cx.com) provides a chance for people to not only suggest ideas for the next version of 3CX but to vote for them. You can see this in action in v18, with the following just a selection of ideas that are making the move from the Ideas forum into reality.

• Skip voicemail greeting – We’re all familiar with voicemail instructions that seem to last forever. It’s fine if you’ve only called the company a couple of times, but if you know that you need to press “4” to reach the services team then it becomes a form of modern-day torture. With 3CX v18, your loyal customers can jump straight to the person or team they want.
• Dial by first name or last name – 3CX has long had a feature that you can “dial” for someone you know by pressing “1”, for example, and then saying their surname. The system finds the matching people (or person), asks you to confirm that’s who you want, and then puts you through. With the upcoming release, it’s possible to dial someone by either their first name or last name.
• Schedule recurring conference calls – Many of us rely on weekly catch-up calls to connect teams working in disparate locations. With 3CX v18, it will be possible to schedule these at the same time and same day of the week, so all you and your users need to do is remember to connect at the right time.
• Simplified way to schedule a meeting – On creating a new meeting, you’ll be able to select which calendar the invite should be sent to via a simple drop-down menu – and it works whether you’re using the 3CX app, a web browser or Outlook. All the necessary information is injected into the various fields, saving you time and hassle.

Find out more about 3CX v18 here

In this week's exclusive feature for The Business Briefing readers, Sabina Weston looks at the ways gamification can make remote working feel more connected and certain workplace tasks less tedious, but also at the ways things can go south if gamification is used incorrectly.

The Business Briefing is a new free weekly digest that highlights everything you should know about the business world around you.

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IT is carrying the extra burden of supporting a remote workforce and the security implications that go along with it, while marketing is racing to serve the customer base and appeal to prospects across different touchpoints and devices. These teams have become the rebuilders as businesses strive to replicate their physical business with digital tools.

This means that collaboration between the two departments has become more important than ever – especially if you’re expecting to survive and thrive in the new business landscape. In our previous guide, we explored how Marketing and IT need to become the digital transformation dream team in your business. In this guide, we’ll explain how to help these departments meet their digital experience goals together during times of change.

As any CIO will tell you, the best workplace tools improve the employee experience and unlock productivity.

So how does Slack stack up? A commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Slack crunches the numbers to show just how much companies save by choosing Slack.

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As MSPs grow, achieving higher margins and maintaining recurring revenue becomes a challenge for them. This is mainly due to the poor knowledge MSPs have with regards to executing sales and marketing campaigns, especially when they are under constant pressure due to rapidly evolving customer requirements.

Most MSPs are run by technologists who essentially gravitate towards the features of the services and the technical capabilities they provide, but have limited experience with selling the value of the services. For MSPs to scale and stand their ground, they must create their own unique brand and value proposition and employ sales tactics that increase their opportunities. They have to learn how to identify their ideal customers, get the message across to them and retain them for longer durations.

Some MSPs struggle with sales and marketing processes due to budget constraints and the inability to hire people with the right skills. However, MSPs can maximize their marketing investments by implementing several cost-effective strategies to attract qualified leads. In this eBook, we’ll discuss three comprehensive marketing and sales strategies that can help MSPs strengthen their sales pipelines and win more customers, all without blowing out their budgets.

Did you know 65% of marketers have no official mobile strategy? Don’t let that be you. Punch above your weight with this guide featuring advice on SMS/push notifications, cross-channel integration, and performance testing.

Download our ignite guide to get up to speed and learn about the benefits of mobile marketing.