Integrate and Formulate: Digital Calling from the Cloud
If IT professionals were 100% honest, few would admit to being completely prepared for the remote working revolution that was forced on every organization early in 2020. Even for those organizations with well-practiced contingency plans, the speed at which workforces transitioned to working from home was game-changing.
Since then, of course, many businesses have settled down into what’s typically some kind of at home/in the office hybrid, and some semblance of normality has returned. But many companies have used the events of the last 18 months as a fulcrum around which they’ve accelerated their digitization.
In some cases, organizations’ customer care and support functions have transitioned to a much more convenient way of working — using cloud-based technology to power their telephone and communications functions. By doing so, they have managed to kill two birds with one stone. Firstly, home and remote working at whatever long-term level become infinitely more practical.
Source: Shutterstock
Secondly, the added benefits of platforms like the one on which we focus today, GoToConnect, massively extend the “traditional” call center’s capabilities.
Readers of these pages who have worked in IT will know the company behind GoToConnect: LogMeIn and its core products that include GoToMeeting, GoToWebinar, LastPass, GoToAssist, and Rescue. For many years, LogMeIn’s category-defining products have unlocked the potential of the modern workforce by making it possible for millions of people and businesses around the globe to do their best work, whenever, however, and most importantly, wherever.
From the same stable and part of a tightly integrated enterprise-grade set of solutions comes GoToConnect. The platform comes with features you’d expect to find on high-end PBX systems but is designed with wider practical business needs in mind.
It’s a simple matter, for instance, to assign personalized phone numbers and route calls easily around departments and hunt groups. Similarly, it allows quick, break-out virtual meeting spaces, and meeting control and screen sharing can easily be re-assigned on the fly — these are features that stem from GoToConnect’s tightly integrated stablemates GoToMeeting, GoToWebinar, and GoToRoom.
Source: GoToConnect by LogMeIn
GoToConnect has clearly been the subject of a great deal of thought for everyday use in mission-critical settings, ensuring continuity and resilience. For instance, customer care professional can to start to chat on one device, transfer to a web browser, and continue on a different platform without missing a beat (or dropping a packet).
There are also deep integrations with many of the tools that businesses will have already. Slack, Salesforce, Zoho, and Teams, for example, can all be interfaced to produce smooth, collaborative workflows that help empower, inform, and support staff wherever they may be working.
GoToConnect’s setup is simple, and its dashboards show users all the information they need about call routing, call groups, stats, dial plans, and workflows. Incoming calls can be assigned to staff or teams, with settings changed according to who’s available, when.
In the next article in this series, we’ll be looking in more detail at the GoToConnect platform, touching on its stablemates to look at the solution’s overall pedigree and exploring the integration options available. On that last point, the platform works superbly out of the box with Microsoft Teams, so if your organization is invested in O365 and has a Microsoft-based workflow, you will want to check back here.
In the meantime, if what you’ve read here rings any bells with regards to your organization, head on over to the GoToConnect homepage to find out more.
