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Innovative, Single-Source Voice & IT Solutions
Serving the DC Region for 39+ Years
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Connect with us
(703) 321-3030
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A Message from the President
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Farewell 2019… Welcome 2020... At the start of every New Year, we all focus on the potential business opportunities and challenges that lie ahead. With the U.S. economy continuing to expand, this is an ideal time to assess and reevaluate your Voice and Data systems and applications with an eye toward making the most of this healthy business cycle. In this issue we cover technology and solutions that can strengthen your competitive edge.
- We lead off covering the use of Smart Workspaces and UC technology, and provide tips for delegating project work with Teamwork & MiTeam Apps and Collaboration Tools.
- Next, we discuss how unifying technology and mobile apps are helping teams bridge the gap to project success with tools that bring everyone together.
- Ready to improve the way you connect your business? We delve into how TCI implements SD-WAN technology to help overcome bandwidth, scalability, complexity and cost concerns common with legacy network services.
- We highlight the most important technology trends that will ensure your cloud Contact Center provides the most engaging experience possible for your customers and how our hosted “Unified Communications as a Service” fills a crucial gap in the fast-moving Cloud Voice market.
- We discuss how TCI supports the DC region’s non-profits and associations with tech planning, assessments and bid consultations to help move your organization ahead and make IT management a lot easier.
Get a running start on the new year’s business opportunities… Contact me today to discuss how TCI can help position your organization for even greater success.
Tom Cornbrooks, President
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It’s a New Decade... How to leverage Smart Workspace & UC technology in your business
Today, the term “workspace” no longer refers to employees sitting at their desks in cubicles, pecking away at their keyboards from 9 to 5. Workspaces have evolved, and today’s “smart” version allows employees to get their work done from any location, at anytime, using any device.
Millennials now make up more than half of the workforce. That number is expected to hit 75% by 2025. This generation is tech-savvy, demands flexibility and thrives on collaboration. Organizations that let workers choose their own style of work increase retention rates by more than 10%. This means businesses that want to attract and retain top talent have to embrace smart workspaces.
TCI’s unified communications systems enable smart workspaces for your employees and provide a suite of collaboration tools that offer…
- A single application for voice, video, messaging, audio conferencing and more so employees can easily switch between channels on the fly.
- A consistent experience across devices.
- Mobile-first design that supports both iOS and Android.
- Audio conferencing and web sharing to promote collaboration.
- Single number reach, making employees accessible on any device.
- Individual and group chat to keep the lines of communication open.
- File and screen sharing, which make it easy to keep team members up-to-date on projects.
- Secure remote access so employees can work from anywhere without having to worry about confidential company information.
- Multi-region and multi-language support to provide employees around the world with access to the same unified experience.
By keeping your employees connected on-the-go, you’ll also break down silos between departments and locations. In other words, smart workspaces are just as good for the bottom line as they are for employee satisfaction and retention.
Interested in details about smart workspaces and how they can help your team and business excel? Contact us today at
(703) 321-3030 or
info@tcicomm.com
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Get More Done… Tips for delegating Project Work with Teamwork & MiTeam Apps & Collaboration Tools
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Delegating work to other people sounds great in theory, but let’s be honest… it can sometimes be a struggle to release control. It takes time and effort to send out assignments and follow up on progress, but the reality is you can’t do everything yourself.
The good news is that better technology and mobile apps are helping teams bridge the gap to project success with tools that work…
- Workspaces – Delegating is much easier with apps like Mitel Teamwork & MiTeam, where you can create focused group workspaces based on projects or teams. Accessible by PC as well as the mobile app, team members can be updated from anywhere, at any time. Send messages and track conversations, share content and files plus add new members to workspaces as required. Working as a team is made simple, keeping information flowing through your organization seamlessly, in one place, so that work can get done faster and smarter, without getting bogged down by email chains.
- Messaging – Equipping employees with virtual workspaces, Teamwork & MiTeam provides a place where employees can come together to work closely and communicate effectively from anywhere. Send group messages to announce updates to team members, as well as alert specific users with @mentions, even start a conference call, if necessary. The mobile app for iOS and Android enables teams to always stay connected, with conversations mirrored across all devices.
- Tasks – Virtual workspaces allow teams to collaborate from anywhere, to create and assign tasks, set priorities, check progress, and ensure everyone is kept up to date, from anyplace, at any time. Personal dashboards for every user ensure they are always in the loop, alerting them to what activities require immediate attention. Data can be stored or archived by project, subject or person.
Teamwork & MiTeam apps bring together messaging and collaboration tools into a single solution, empowering your teams to be productive from anywhere. The seamless flow of information throughout your team makes delegation easier and ensures that all tasks stay on track to ensure the success of any project.
Equip your teams to manage projects more efficiently and get more work done. Contact TCI today:
(703) 321-3030 or
info@tcicomm.com
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We're ready to manage your SD-WAN deployment or support it "as a Service"
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Software-Defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN) technology can help overcome the bandwidth, scalability, complexity and cost concerns common with legacy network services.
With legacy business WAN links - such as MPLS - rapidly exceeding the capacity for which they were originally designed, a software-defined network lets you take advantage of broadband and fiber links to significantly save on WAN costs and deliver the desired level of performance you need.
Ideal for multi-site deployments and critical cloud applications like Voice, Data and Video, SD-WAN also enables you to offer the highest level of performance to your locations without sacrificing security or data privacy.
There are many ways your business can benefit from an SD-WAN…
- Platform unification – Combines SD-WAN, firewall, segmentation, routing, WAN optimization and visibility, and control functions in a single platform.
- Backhaul elimination – The traditional router-centric model that backhauls traffic from the branch to headquarters to the Internet and back again no longer makes sense and is no longer necessary with an SD-WAN.
- Increased throughput & reliability – Application-aware routing protocols let your network adjust to demands in network traffic.
- Performance optimization – Features like a scalable pipeline and intelligent path selection can improve network performance enterprise-wide.
- Performance tracking – Monitor critical web applications traveling through VPN tunnels or directly through the public Internet.
- Problem identification – Easily pinpoint the cause of poor application performance at LAN, WAN, or server.
- Time & travel savings – Handle tasks like pushing policies to branch locations and launching new sites remotely from a central location.
- Cost reduction – With intelligent software substituting for hardware functionality, you can save as expensive hardware options are consolidated or phased out.
SD-WAN adoption can be a gradual process…
There’s no need to scrap existing investments in traditional networking infrastructure. No matter what kind of network solutions you may have in place now, TCI can ease your transition, help you select from the best Carriers, provide SD-WAN as a Service and manage all the deployment details.
Let’s talk about how SD-WAN can improve the way you connect your business. Contact TCI today at
(703) 321-3030 or
info@tcicomm.com
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5 Cloud Contact Center Trends to watch in 2020
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With 2020 upon us, it’s safe to say the cloud contact center has arrived. Over 70% of businesses already have their contact center in the cloud or at least have plans to start the migration this year.
What follows are the most important trends you need to know to ensure your cloud contact center stays on the cutting edge. The technologies supporting these trends will help you create the most engaging experience possible for your customers.
1. A real omnichannel experience provides even more ways to communicate.
A true omnichannel experience allows customers to move seamlessly from one channel of communications to another without skipping a beat. Achieving this requires working with a provider that offers true omnichannel support. TCI’s implementation of Mitel’s MiCloud Connect Contact Center, for example, allows your customers to communicate effortlessly with your agents as they navigate between voice, web, text and other options without losing any of their information or having to repeat themselves.
2. Artificial Intelligence delivers training and assistance.
Although AI already has begun to transform cloud contact centers, planned investments mean the technology will have an even bigger impact in 2020. The technology brings real-time training and coaching through virtual agent assist. Virtual agents are AI-powered chat bots that monitor interactions between agents and customers – even if the conversation moves between channels – to provide guidance and training for the agent in real time.
3. Analytics play a more powerful role.
Contact centers have long been collecting data on customers, but the information is useless if it isn’t properly analyzed and applied. This is where AI makes all the difference. The use of natural language processing (NLP) interprets data and provides analysis around why customers contact you, ways you can improve your products and services and how you make information available to customers. Since these insights are created in real-time, you can respond and adapt to customers’ preferences quickly, increasing loyalty while staying ahead of the competition.
4. Self-service expands.
Customers don’t want to get stuck in a queue or wait for a human agent – especially when they have a simple question about a product or service. Chat bots allow customers to get answers to basic questions and FAQs. They also free up human agents to focus on more complex queries and keep wait times down for those who really do need to speak to a live agent.
A key differentiator in 2020 will be the provision of chat bots that create a smooth transition when a customer needs live support. Smart bots route customers to an agent with the appropriate level of expertise and provide agents with a full history of the customer engagement. This saves customers from having to repeat themselves and enables agents to pick up exactly where the chat bot left off.
5. The rise of the remote contact center workforce.
Cloud contact centers have ushered in the ability to maintain a remote contact center workforce, without the need to offshore calls to a third-party vendor. With a cloud contact center, agents can be dispersed throughout the country, putting them closer to your customers. The money saved on office space and other overhead can be applied toward hiring local talent that can provide localized service. “Homeshoring” improves customer satisfaction, and this trend will continue in 2020.
Putting these cloud trends at the center of your contact center plans will help you meet your customers’ expectations for a stellar experience.
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Supporting DC Metro’s Non-profits & Associations with Technology Planning, Assessments & Bid Consultations
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TCI is your local, go-to partner for IT strategic planning
Our experts will analyze your entire IT infrastructure including software, systems, processes, networks and applications. We then provide you with a comprehensive project plan that contains our recommendations. It is our goal to help you exploit the best technology to move your organization ahead and make managing IT easy.
Providing you with Assessments & Audits
Our technical assessments and audits help you better understand your organization’s current IT systems. An audit will let you know whether your network is operating at peak performance, what systems are hogging resources, whether your current IT strategy fits your business and more. We perform health checks for all of your systems while proactively searching for hidden problems. We’ll work with you to establish the kind of technology your organization needs and propose an IT budget to help you better understand all costs in advance.
Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery
We know the damage that can be done to an organization when disaster strikes. Our goal is to save you from headaches resulting from lost data, time and resources due to recreating a corrupt or missing database, disrupted systems and networks, and more. Accordingly, we identify risks, threats and exposure, and determine appropriate responses for systems and networks. This may include recommending data protection measures, off-grid power sourcing, and secure off-site storage. We also check the feasibility of implementing telework programs to keep your organization functioning during an emergency.
Procurement & Bid Consulting
We work with you to make sure you are getting exactly what you want from your telecommunication providers. We offer you improved savings through innovative price reduction and/or quantity discounts, speedier contract negotiation, reduced miscommunication, less chance of unexpected costs, and better outcomes. Our experts handle all the details from bid consulting and procurement to implementation and ongoing support.
Third Party Vendor Management
Our experts work to leverage well-established vendor relationships to secure prompt response to technical issues. We get your issues resolved quicker and your systems and networks back to proper operation faster. We’ll manage escalations, track progress, monitor vendor performance, and report changes in status to you. Most importantly, we maintain a line of communication with you to avoid misunderstanding and proactively address any issues at their onset.
Project consulting and services you can rely on
Our team of consultants will learn about your organization and work with your team to plan projects and ensure that we meet your IT goals. We take away the stress and problems that can be a direct result of poor project planning by defining project success criteria along with major milestones and target dates for each. You get a clear statement of project objectives, costs and deliverables. Our negotiation and communication skills help keep projects moving forward and within budget.
TCI makes managing technology easy. Contact us today at
(703) 321-3030 or
info@tcicomm.com
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Spotlight on TCI Host/UCaaS… How The TCI Difference sets our solutions apart
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Individually Designed. Flawlessly Engineered. Meticulously Implemented.
Powered by technology from global leader Mitel, our Hosted “Unified Communications as a Service” fills a crucial gap in the DC region’s fast moving Cloud Voice market.
Whether you’re a small or large business, we custom design and manage every solution specifically for your unique requirements. Every TCI Host/UCaaS client is provided a fully-featured, dedicated arrangement that doesn’t share resources with any other customer. Unlike “One Size Fits All” offerings, our solution will not restrict access to features or limit your deployment options.
Flexible Deployment & Acquisition Options
Exploiting the flexibility of IP technology, your virtualized UC platform may be deployed on your premises, in a public or private cloud, or any data center location, including TCI’s. You can Rent, Lease, or Purchase and we offer Fully Managed or Self-Managed support.
We’re Proven & Experienced
- Providing service and solutions for 40+ years
- More than 3,000 systems installed – local, nationwide, globally
- Over 35,000+ lines under service contracts
- Mitel Certified Voice & Data Technical Engineers
- 24 x 7 x 365 Live Answer Customer Service
A Seamless, Easy Transition
Unlike other Business VoIP providers, TCI takes care of all the important details for you, from delivering and installing phones to network set-up and testing, feature programming, training, and ongoing support.
Ready to simplify and improve your Business Communications? Contact us today at
(703) 321-3030 or
info@tcicomm.com
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Need Support? Moving? Expanding?
24/7/365
Nationwide Support
(800) 824-1001
DC & Baltimore Metro
Virginia, Maryland, DC
(703) 321-3030
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