During the pandemic, many businesses turned to Teams for collaborative working. This meant many found they were not utilizing their office phone system, that they had a phone system sitting in the office and a unified communications solution sitting on a laptop, but they were not connected.
In this video Sam Price, Manager of Product Development at TelNet Worldwide, talks about their Teams strategy.
Read the Case study to learn why TelNet chose Call2Teams for kick-starting it’s Teams strategy.
TelNet Worldwide delivers voice services and data center solutions across the Great Lakes region in the U.S. They strive to simplify and unify the way business communicates. Partnering with not only traditional voice agents, but Microsoft vendors as well, TelNet Worldwide was quick to recognize the opportunity presented by the growth of Microsoft Teams. With that in mind, they have made integrating with Microsoft Teams a priority, recognizing market demand and the growth opportunity for their business.
The Challenge:
TelNet wanted to support their customers, by delivering a simple way to unify telephony and Teams unified communications. Something they had explored implementing themselves using Direct Routing.
“Previous to using Call2Teams we had Direct Routing as a product offering, it was delivered off a physical SBC that we were hosting in our data center here in Michigan. We had quite a few issues that we ran into, not only with configuration, but service uptime, and the deliverability of those SBCs was not as reliable. So, we were looking for something not only more reliable but virtualized. We really didn’t want to have to mess with the physical equipment aspect of the product. purchasing more devices, configuring more devices, installing more devices.” – Sam Price, Manager of Product Development, TelNet Worldwide
The Solution:
Call2Teams is a cloud-native, middleware product that easily voice-enables Microsoft Teams with existing enterprise-grade telephony.
“When adopting Call2Teams we went through numerous demos and explored the technology to ensure that it met TelNet’s needs. We also considered the support, we wanted to make sure we could approach Call2Teams with any issues and get them resolved quickly.
Initially, we chose plug-and-play. To save on development time and resources. To be in the market quickly. Right now, we’re working through a project to unify all our product portals. For this, we are moving to use the API integrations offered by Call2Teams to totally build it into our portal. Then that way, it’s all one experience for the customer.” – Sam Price, Manager of Product Development, TelNet Worldwide.
What drove the requirement for Call2Teams?
The need to voice-enable Microsoft Teams was the driver for TelNet to adopt direct routing into their portfolio. But what drove the requirement for Call2Teams?
“It’s all about service turn-up. The ability and the automation within the portal, how much quicker and easier that was. As well as the ease of use of the Call2Teams portal itself. These were the two driving factors.” Mark Wajer, CTO, TelNet Worldwide
Mark explains further why Call2Teams is a good fit “The bread and butter is the Trunking, and that was the driving motivation for why we adopted the platform initially, but my favorite is the Call2Teams for PBX and the Phone App. We have adopted these in the last three to six months. These help us service remote users, on-prem, and PBX users. Being able to take two different platforms, tie them together, and have it all automated through a super easy-to-use portal. That’s my favorite.” – Mark Wajer, CTO, TelNet WorldWide
The Benefits:
Adopting Direct Routing as a Service presented a certain level of risk, TelNet operates and owns their own voice platform, so they did not want to impact their reputation. The benefits though have been worthwhile. TelNet with the Call2Teams solution are able to rapidly offer enterprise-grade Direct Routing for their customers. With their original solution gathering technical information from customers to configure the SBCs was a blocker. With Call2Teams this is no longer an issue.
“Self-service is something that customers need and want, especially ones of size. Our target customer has moved upmarket, and those customers want to serve themselves. They’re dedicated IT folks that want to have little involvement with the provider. That’s totally fine. Customers want to be self-sufficient, to serve themselves with web-based portals. That is exactly what Call2Teams is. They can configure themselves at the speed that they want. That’s been the biggest feedback item. They’re not sitting waiting for us, they do it when they’re able to.” – Sam Price, Manager of Product Development TelNet Worldwide
The Results:
TelNet recognizes the growth of Microsoft Teams as a key opportunity and has engaged with Dstny Automate on both Call2Teams and Carrier Automate to further develop their Teams calling strategy.
TelNet is moving to a white-label solution on the Call2Teams platform, further embedding the solution within their product portfolio. They are also onboarding to Operator Connect, supported via Carrier Automate.
“Microsoft is going to continue to run the world! Teams is going to stay in the top one or two for the foreseeable future. With a continuation down that self-service path, now with Microsoft Operator Connect. For us, that’s the next evolution of PSTN Teams calling, onboarding to Operator Connect, as we look to continue supporting our customers with the best ways to voice-enable Microsoft Teams.” – Mark Wajer, CTO, TelNet Worldwide