As senior product leadership at Windstream Enterprise, Austin Herrington and Scott Yelton are deeply rooted in our unified communications development. In this Q&A, they discuss the future of customer experience (CX) and what lies ahead with Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) solutions.
Q: What unique solutions/services does Windstream Enterprise offer in the CX space?
"OfficeSuite UC® from Windstream Enterprise offers a rich customer experience, thanks to a complete suite of voice and collaboration features that can be tailored to the unique needs of any organization. It works seamlessly with our award-winning WE Connect portal to deliver a high-quality experience for softphone mobile and desktop users alike. What’s more, it integrates with third-party applications including Salesforce, Microsoft Teams, Google G Suite, Slack, Amazon Alexa and many others. We will continue to focus on further development of OfficeSuite’s integration with Microsoft Teams.
We’re also working to extend productivity and customer response with data-driven insights. For example, the WE Connect Insight Engine shows businesses with OfficeSuite UC where they are missing calls during key hours of the workday and provides recommendations on how to improve performance.
Additionally, our OfficeSuite HD Meeting® solution offers a unique experience for business meetings with a robust set of tools for meeting host administrators and educators. Our customer experience is enhanced through AI-powered personalization and chatbots assisting with onboarding, service issues and learning.
On the customer care side, businesses can take advantage of the fully integrated OfficeSuite UC® Contact Center Services (CCS) platform to help queue calls and chats, view live and historical agent activity, and record calls to enhance customer experiences while managing employee performance."
Q: What is Windstream Enterprise doing to ensure resilience in their CX solutions—especially when more businesses now depend on bandwidthintensive services such as videoconferencing?
"OfficeSuite UC ensures 100% uptime and error-free voice and video when paired with SD-WAN in active/active dual broadband configuration. This combination increases resiliency with redundant, diverse connections at each site for seamless failover and business continuity at all business locations.
If an issue arises, network analytics can identify it through predictive fault finding, resulting in improved network performance, enhanced metrics IT can access via UI dashboards, and proactive ticketing, which can shorten repair times.
Additionally, Windstream Enterprise recently introduced local survivability options, such as an on-premises data center for mission-critical customers using Avaya UCaaS."
Q: What steps has Windstream Enterprise taken to help IT evaluate and measure app performance in the cloud?
"Windstream Enterprise UCaaS solutions are integrated with WE Connect, a “single pane of glass” portal that gives IT unparalleled visibility and control over their UC deployment. WE Connect offers much more than basic network monitoring by providing detail into network health, performance and status.
Application performance can be evaluated down to the application user and device level—not only to measure performance but also to enhance it by changing prioritization. This is done through Windstream Enterprise SD-WAN, which can be paired with OfficeSuite UC to create a powerful performance enhancement tool."
Q: As remote work becomes the norm, endpoint security for remote workers has become an urgent issue. How does Windstream Enterprise tackle this challenge?
"Windstream Enterprise supports the Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) security framework to ensure both users and devices have secure cloud access to applications, data and services anywhere and at any time.
When paired up with SD-WAN, SASE is an ideal method of delivering security in the cloud. Additionally, our Managed Network Security (MNS) and Secure Remote Access (SRA) services provide secure connectivity via IP or WiFi for employees working from home, or from a location other than the corporate network.
From there, our WE Connect portal makes it easy for IT administrators to manage all services to add, change and delete end-users."
Q: Looking ahead, what are your strategic priorities for CX solutions and services during the next 12 months?
"The world has embraced video—and collaboration is at the heart of it. Windstream Enterprise will continue to advance the Zoom-powered OfficeSuite HD Meeting solution with webinar and streaming capabilities, which will allow enterprise customers to reach large audiences with content.
OfficeSuite UC CCS will get some exciting updates, including additional communication channels, natural language processing and a platform code change that will provide a richer, more intuitive customer experience."
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