Hosted and cloud-based telephony

Traditionally there have always been some standard fears surrounding hosted and cloud-based telephony solutions. 

Some of the most common I've encountered have been: 

Emergency calls - fear that emergency numbers such as 999 would not work if the telephony solution was not connected to a static network, or that emergency services may not be able to detect locations. 

Poor voice quality - This has been a long-standing fear that voice quality is heavily dependent on broadband quality. 

Security - As telephony solutions are connected to the internet there is a fear of making the organisation vulnerable to security threats.  

These are amongst many of the most common concerns and fears raised in the past by organisations when presented with hosted telephony options.  

Fast forward to March 2020 when the pandemic took the world by storm and many of these typical concerns became a real topic of conversation for the majority of companies across the globe, with telephony providers running with the opportunity to demonstrate the reality and advancements in hosted telephony, dispelling all common myths.  

It was no surprise to see a product like Microsoft Teams leading the way with an explosive growth rate that could never have been predicted. With the Teams platform, organisations could instantly collaborate internally, host meetings externally and access so many more platform features, all at their fingertips.  

This change did come with its challenges as the native Teams telephony stack doesn’t tick all the boxes for every organisation. The challenge so many faced lay with the more traditional phone systems collaborating remotely across vast employee bases and geographies. Organisations realised the difficulties this presented with their on-premise infrastructure.  

This brought forth an influx of innovations and a market flooded with direct routing options and providers tacking in more traditional telephony functionality on top of the Teams client.  

This lead to organisations not only tackling those pre-existing reservations and myths of cloud telephony head-on but developing and bolting on features and functionalities creating truly innovative and competitive platforms.  

We are now seeing true CCaaS (Contact Centre as a Service) features being integrated with Teams, resulting in Teams being the platform of choice for organisations that it previously wouldn't have suited. We are seeing overlays of inbound routing platforms, call recording, CCaaS and a wide array of more advanced features being built in conjunction with Teams truly enhancing the users' experience, features and assisting in the growth and dominance of Teams.  

Wavenet is a leading direct routing provider with years of expertise in Microsoft telephony and a robust and advanced platform.  We have deployed our TeamsLink in collaboration with our Distributor Partner, Risc IT Solutions, to a well-known charity. Our platform gave them flexibility and kept them fully functional during the pandemic.  

Alzheimer's Research UK Case Study  

With the onset of Covid-19 coupled with a failing system, the current situation for the charity could have been completely different. They could have ended up with 1 person trying to answer 20 calls simultaneously from the main number and having to manually divert all calls. 

With Risc IT Solutions and TeamsLink from Wavenet, Alzheimer’s Research UK have moved to working from home with total ease. This is aided by the granularity of reporting in Teams: they can now see how many calls they have taken and their most popular times. Most importantly, there’s no limit to simultaneous calls so engaged tones, deadlines, and missed donations are a thing of the past. 

We’re proud to have helped Alzheimer’s Research. In just six weeks we provided a platform and firm foundation for future success. 

“We recently rolled out Microsoft Teams with voice across the organisation. The technology has enabled flexibility and reliability that we simply didn’t have with previous products. In our current climate, this has ensured our entire workforce have been able to make the transition to home-working with ease. 

Thanks to Risc IT Solutions’ project management, including an internal communications plan and training materials, coupled with their thorough onsite training, it made the rollout of Teams seamless and ensured our employees were well informed on how best to utilise the technology. 

This has enabled us to communicate and collaborate more effectively and will further enable Alzheimer’s Research UK to work towards our mission”. 

Head of IT - Alzheimer’s Research UK