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In a digital world, people engaging with brands increasingly want to be able to have synchronous conversations across multiple channels, in real time. However, without the right integration, this results in a fragmentation of engagements and a lack of visibility resulting in businesses not being able to measure whether they are achieving their service level agreements or not, and more broadly a degraded experience for customers.

This was a far simpler prospect in the past when the only way to contact an organisation was to dial a single number that led one to a switchboard operator, who would then transfer the caller to the right people or department, where the call would be logged. Today, a customer could follow up on a query via a WhatsApp chat or a chat widget on the company website; how [...]

With the ability to provide great customer experience (CX) playing a growing role in business success, organisations have increasingly turned to technology to provide this personalised level of service. While traditionally limited to large corporations, the advent of the cloud is now bringing this level of functionality – in a cost-effective way – to small and medium-sized businesses too.

South Africans are currently spending well over 10 hours per day online, and want to be able to interact with brands in multiple ways. Rather than just using the phone or email, they want to be able to use the channel they are most familiar with, whether it is through instant messaging, social media platforms or even real time chat (webRTC) on a company website.

As organisations around the world come to terms with the biggest disruption in living memory, the fundamentals of a successful business remain intact, and one of the most important of these pillars is relationships.

A customer’s journey with a business is built on relationships. As businesses scale and adapt to hybrid working environments, they need to ensure that the relationships they build with increasingly savvy customers don’t suffer, and this requires responsiveness and agility. Businesses must use tools that provide a seamless, simple and effective customer experience. In a contact centre, which is often the primary interface with customers, journeys need to be designed to meet a need as swiftly and logically as possible.

A journey that began more than a decade ago with the Telviva Cloud Phone Service, regarded as the most powerful business phone system in South Africa, has culminated with the arrival of the Telviva One unified communications (UC) platform to integrate voice, video and chat.

The development of Telviva One was fast-tracked to make it available as a free add-on to customers during the lockdown and enable them to give employees a more effective way of communicating when working remotely by liberating users from their desk phones.

Here is the latest updated offering from Avaya’s IP Office Product. IP Office has been a huge success, and AnD support many in the Durban area. As Avaya business partners for the past 15 years, AnD has extensive experience in supporting Avaya products in the Durban and greater KZN area. Our speciality is Avaya IP Office, which can either be a software-based or appliance-based PBX, and supports up to 2000 users across 32 locations on a single network. IP Office has a full suite of VoIP, Call Centre, and real-time communication offerings as part of its portfolio. Why not have a look at the latest product sheet for more details, and contact us if you need support or sales on Avaya.

Should you differentiate between a PABX or a PBX? No, but what you do want to do is differentiate between your provider. This article goes into the detail, with some interesting history and describes both on premise from the past and cloud based PBX into the future. At AnD we support both, but we only provide the best of breed products like Avaya IP Office and Mitel MiVoice Business for On premise systems. For our Cloud based hosted PBX, Telviva is the product for reliable VoIP based communications. The article about Telviva Vision explains some of the custom developed, web based tools provided to make the end user telephony experience great. Look out for an article shortly on Telvia Mobile, our own mobile smartphone app due to be released soon.

The world of telecoms can be a tricky one. Websites all over seem to give a lot of information on their products, but it’s seldom the information you actually need. At Telviva, we want to simplify your life, not confuse it, so we thought we would break down a small question that some of our customers and clients have been asking us; “What is the difference between a PBX and a PABX?” The first obvious thing, is the introduction of that little ‘A’. In a nutshell, PBX stands for Private Branch Exchange, and PABX stands for Private Automatic Branch Exchange. The word ‘Automatic’ gives a hint as to how the two differ from each other. Basically, a PABX is a type of PBX that is simply automated.

South African public cloud communication solutions provider Connection Telecom has acquired 51% of shares in Analog and Digital Communications (AnD), an independent provider of private branch exchange and contact centre voice solutions, for an undisclosed amount. Founded in 2004, Connection Telecom is an independent provider of multi-tenanted cloud real-time communications solutions to Southern African businesses. Under the deal, AnD's existing owners and executives, Kelvin Brown and Jill Thompson, retain their management responsibilities, and no changes in the current employment structure of AnD is expected.

In businesses and organisations across the world, rooms once humming with wires, black boxes and blinking lights now sit empty. In a phone cupboard, there’s only dust, a single lonely terminal, or perhaps a foosball table where IT pros can let off steam. The cloud – and more specifically, cloud hosted communications – is the source of the transformation, which has fundamentally changed the IT landscape. Some IT pros have embraced it. Some are working on migrating to hosted PBX systems over time. And others, through choice or necessity, are sticking with an on-premises PBX approach.