Latin America: With UC&C, Business Will Never Be the Same

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This week, Brazil takes a deep breath from the whirlwind days of the FIFA World Cup and returns to business. The fact is that businesses in Brazil, and in Latin America for that matter, are not going to be the same much longer. In short, business for a lot of people is no longer limited to the confines of an office. Research indicates that by 2015, there will be 1.3 billion mobile workers worldwide. Recognizing this shift, businesses across the globe are leveraging modern communications tools, those which enable workers who are on the go to remain connected in order to adapt to this changing landscape.

Unified Communications tools are becoming more popular than ever as they cater to a mobile workforce. Such tools that combine voice, data, presence, email, and video into a single interface provide employees with access to their critical communications from any Internet-connected device, no matter where they happen to find themselves.

3 Ways to Lower Costs in Healthcare with Unified Communications

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Escalating costs in healthcare has been a constant headline topic for years. So much so that worldwide famous economists, Robert S. Kaplan and Michael Porter both tackled the healthcare cost problem by suggesting the activity-based costing method. The main pillar of this method is streamlining operations. Studies show that doctors spend 25% of their time in direct patient contact while another 24% is spent communicating with fellow colleagues. 24%! This is a huge percentage that no doubt could be lowered by employing smarter communication tools.

As such, healthcare providers, both large and small must constantly look to take advantage of new communication infrastructure enhancements. And many of them, if they haven’t already deployed them, are looking towards Unified Communications solutions.

Eva Blue - Peaceful Hearts Doctor, San Francisco
© Eva Blue – Peaceful Hearts Doctor, San Francisco

 

Collaboration Software: Impressive Results on Business Productivity

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Business collaboration is that elusive Holy Grail of corporate executives. Blamed whenever a project fails or derails (96% of executives blame workplace failures on lack of it), hailed as the key to success whenever somethings works, every business planning cycle takes into account how to improve the way employees collaborate. Yet, since collaboration software or enterprise social networks stepped into the world, improving how we work is closer to reality.

In fact, in a recent study by MIT Sloan Management Review and Deloitte, 86% of businesses indicated that online collaboration software was either “important” or “somewhat important”. Compared to 52% in 2012 and 75% in 2013, it’s fairly obvious that businesses are increasingly turning toward such solutions to bolster productivity, streamline business processes, and encourage collaboration as much as possible.

To keep up with this interest level and likely sales opportunities, service providers should consider adding collaboration software to their portfolios.

Improving Organizational Efficiency

World Cup Football on the Edge and the Need for a Resilient Contact Center

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The United States might be known for many things, but the prowess of its men’s soccer team is not one of them. This is the reason why many football enthusiasts around the world were puzzled when John Brooks’ header made it passed the Ghanaian goalie in the 86th minute of the World Cup game, giving the Americans a 2-1 lead they wouldn’t relinquish.

It was an upset to say the least. And Americans across the country took to Twitter to celebrate en-masse, indicating a large U.S. fan base for the Brazil-hosted event, as well as a hit for social media platforms. Twitter reported 4.9 million tweets sent during the U.S. vs. Ghana match. The latest U.S. vs. Portugal also brought a flurry of activity on Twitter when Portugal’s Varela managed to equalize the score in minute 90+5′ 🙂

In The Company of Strong Teammates

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For the past three years, 4PSA’s girls cycling team mounted the podium in the women’s category at the Skoda Velo Challenge. We have a dedicated corner in our open space filled with the trophies they brought home. This is a good motivation to train hard every year, because maintaining a top place is not an easy task. And now we’ve raced our bikes in the Baneasa forest once again.

For those of you who do not know what Skoda Velo Challenge is, here’s the short story: it’s a relay cycling race opened for people working at the same company. We team up to compete against other companies in the same field of work or in the general classification. It’s basically a fun day in the woods, without computers and tasks, but with deadlines to meet. Well, you do need to beat the other competitors’ times, don’t you?

Winning Does Not Come Easy, But Feels Great

With only two girls willing to join the ranks this year, we took a different approach. We entered the race with two teams in the mixed competition. Team Hubgets and Team VoipNow, each made of three boys and one girl, lined up at the starting grid, along with 81 teams from other companies. Team Hubgets relied on stronger riders and aimed high. Team VoipNow was all about the fun of it.

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Transforming Contact Centers with VoipNow

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Companies today understand the importance of differentiating their businesses from the competition’s by offering customer service that is second-to-none. This imperative is supported by recent research, which indicates that more than half of customers will take their business elsewhere in the aftermath of a negative experience with a brand.

When companies decide to enhance customer service delivery, their decision makers often first look at contact centers. Since contact centers serve as the human extension of brands, they are the primary interface with key targets and, therefore, of paramount importance in retaining customers or improving relationships with them.

As a result, many businesses choose to deploy industry-leading contact center solutions, many of them cloud-based, to bolster their customer service offerings. And this means that business is good for contact center providers.

Service providers catering to these businesses need to stay on top of industry trends and add to their portfolios those solutions that ensure their customers get all the functionality they want. Cloud communications platforms are a common solution for several customer service key trends.

Why We Were Happy to Support Rails Girls Bucharest

On May 30-31st, for the first time ever, Bucharest was the host of the international Rails Girls event, that we were happy to support as a main sponsor. Rails Girls Bucharest was a 2-day free workshop exclusively dedicated to women who are new to software engineering, but keen on learning Ruby on Rails. The event, organized by Girls Who Code Romania, was held simultaneously in Bucharest, Cluj, and Timișoara.

We chose to support Rails Girls Bucharest, not only because at 4PSA women are significantly represented (approximately 45% of our software engineers are women). But because we truly believe that women play an important role in technology.

3 Ways for Service Providers to Benefit from IaaS Market Trends

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Cloud computing market is no longer a trend or a niche subject. Cloud seems to be here to stay and is slowly becoming the new playing field, shaping up industries as it grows and forcing them to adapt.

In a series of articles we’ll investigate how the cloud computing market is segmented, its growth rate and also what this whirlwind evolution means for service providers that focus on SMBs.

GalleryManager – Winning App In Spring Race III

As promised, today’s post is authored by Laur Neagu, winner of the last online hackathon in our Spring Races series.

Hello everyone! My name is Laur and I’m the designer of the winning app in Spring Race III. When I started developing the app, I didn’t think of a name for it. Meanwhile, I found one – GalleryManager 🙂

The purpose of GalleryManager is to classify a set of pictures according to a series of criteria such as time of day, picture quality, location, weather conditions, etc. We all know that managing our camera roll pictures can be a nightmare, so I’m thinking many people will find this app very useful.

What is interesting about it is that it recognizes the number of people shown in pictures. Plus, it saves to a temporary folder the faces recognized in each picture. The photos, saved as grayscale, and are focused on face details. Now that I’ve enabled this, I’m very close to finding the total number of pictures in which a certain person appears, throughout the entire camera roll, indicating those exact pictures, and a couple of more interesting criteria. For now, using Gallery Manager you can sort your photos by the number of faces in the pictures.

How Cloud Communications Help Create a Holistic Customer Experience

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By 2020, customer experience will matter more than price and product in determining consumer purchases. A strong and sobering fact for most companies. Thanks to the rise of the digital world, customers now have more choices when it comes to brand selection. Following a bad experience with a company, consumers are able to go online and spread the word about their poor experience. And this experience soon leads the way in which other consumers will make their purchase decisions. Because of this, many forward-thinking businesses are focused on cultivating an environment leading to positive customer experiences.

Deciding to pay more attention to improving customer service, many contact center decision makers are embracing the fact that customer experience needs a holistic approach. Customers no longer tolerate companies living and acting in silos. In fact, an omni-channel customer experience stands out as one of the top trends affecting how customers perceive their interactions with a specific company.

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