What Does Our Hosted Telephony Include?

Posted by SAS on Jan 7, 2019 11:31:00 AM

To assist you further in your journey, we’ve compiled a guide to our hosted telephony offering. Whilst this isn’t a technical services guide, it is aimed to provide you with a solid overview of what to expect when consuming the FluidOne hosted telephony solution.

The solution comprises three main components. Our hosted telephony platform is configured using a core carrier grade platform, peripheral hardware and a wealth of consumable enterprise ready add-ons.

Carrier Grade Platform

SAS provide a carrier grade solution built on the latest BroadSoft platform. The hosted platform has an up time of 99.999% and offers over 500 features, with more and more being added as technology progresses. The major benefit of running a cloud platform is that additions and improvements are simple to rollout, without the need for planned maintenance or downtime.

User licences exist templated to apply features to each defined persona. These typically take the shape of standard voice, advanced voice and Unified Communications. Each license template is designed to address the common communication needs across types of users that exist across most businesses. Utilising the flexibility of a cloud platform, these license templates are customisable for bespoke requirements.

BroadSoft

SAS use the BroadSoft platform to deliver its core telephony features. BroadSoft, Inc. is a global communication software and service provider that was purchased by Cisco Systems in 2018 for $1.9bn. With leading market share in cloud UC call-control shipments, BroadSoft are the industry leader in cloud unified communications and chosen by 25 of the world’s top 30 service providers across 80 countries. BroadSoft was founded in 1998 and completed its initial public offering public in 2010 and is headquartered in Maryland.

BroadSoft provides the building blocks for service providers to build cloud-based communications services such as voice, video, web conferencing and team messaging services.

Hardware

Our BroadSoft platform is extremely versatile when it comes to supporting handsets and headsets. Whilst the platform can support a wide variety of handsets through interoperability testing, SAS has selected market leaders Polycom and Yealink as the suggested handset manufacturers for hosted telephony.

The decision to choose Polycom or Yealink is factored in at the requirements gathering stage. Both manufacturers specialise in different scenarios. It is important that our solution is tailored to your requirements, rather than prescriptive.

Specialist handsets and headsets are available for deployments that require a bespoke approach. SAS has an extensive history of providing a tailored solution, outside of normal implementations scenarios.

Peripheral Services

In support of the rich telephony features enabled by the BroadSoft platform, our solution provides several key services in addition to hosted telephony.

Unified Communications

Hosted telephony platforms are more advanced than ever. Deploying a telephony platform is no longer simply about the telephone. Our hosted platform comprises advanced functionality that combines the real-time communication experience with static communications.

Features such as instant messaging and unified messaging are included in a Unified Comms license. The tools are often adopted by businesses looking to go the extra mile with their communications stack. Unified Communications is thought of as a key enabler of productivity increase. 62 percent of survey respondents said improved employee collaboration is a top business driver for Unified Comms.

Call Centre

Cloud call centre services are consumable for customer facing teams. Included in this license are standard call centre functions like agent status codes, call queuing and PCI compliant cloud call recording.

Scalable from 2 to 10,000 users, 200 sets of historical and real-time call statistics, dials, alarms, charts and desktop wallboards are at your disposal.

Analytics

Real time and historical call analytics are available across the entire hosted telephony platform. This suite of services delivers completely customisable reports and insights related to all extensions, devices and groups within a business or department.

Including technical, quality and business analytics, our selection of cloud analytics tools offer graphical and detailed views of the trends occurring with your outbound and inbound call traffic.

Delving further into cloud analytics, we see the introduction of customer journey mapping. Here, you can see the entire experience that the caller has received. As soon as the call is connected, the journey is tracked. Customer journey analytics show key presses, hold time and any point where the call is transferred. You can use customer journey analytics to drive continuous improvement across your customer facing teams.

Integration

With the ability to integrate with third party applications, our BroadSoft platform enhances the capabilities of your other business applications.

Integration into desktop environments such as Office 365, Salesforce and Lotus Notes combine your most heavily used tools to leverage joint features through computer telephony integration (CTI).

Once connected via our integration tool, features include contact popping, click to dial, desktop call control, presence, messaging, and calendar sync.

Business Continuity

In the event of a disaster, or an event that stops users from reaching the office and using their usual method of communication, our BroadSoft platform comes with built in business continuity plans.

You can pre-build disaster recovery scenarios that can be turned on manually or triggered automatically if thresholds are breached. These are applicable at both individual user level and group services level. This ensures that DDIs, hunt groups and call queues are all looked after, if an event occurs.

When moving to hosted telephony, the primary component to look for is fit. Does the hosted telephony platform you are looking at fit your business? If the answer is yes, straight out of the box, great. In most cases, telephony solutions need to be tailored to each business’s unique requirements.

By utilising a leading cloud PBX platform, and combining enterprise grade call centre, conferencing and analytics products, the SAS platform stands out amongst the competition.

To learn more about the flexibility of our platform and to start planning your implementation, book a call with one of our experts.

 

If you would like to find out more, then you may like to read one of our other blogs or downloads, or request a conversation with one of our consultants. We are always happy to discuss, without obligation.