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The 2023 Edition of Enterprise Connect kicks off this week in Orlando, Fl. This is the industry’s largest telecom and networking event and while it’s unlikely we will see Mickey there, there will be a veritable cornucopia of news from vendors.
One of the more interesting announcements was from Bandwidth, whose new Maestro offering will enable organizations to integrate voice apps and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities with their preferred unified communications (UC) and contact center (CC) platforms.
In a fast moving, all digital, CX driven world, the ability to roll out new communications-centric services faster can be the difference between being a market leader or a laggard.
Also see: Top Digital Transformation Companies
Communications: Core to Digital Transformation
Although not the sexiest part of IT, telecom remains a critically important part of digital transformation initiatives. Customer experience often starts in the contact center and then involves using voice plus other channels to interact with the customer.
There is heavy investment in moving both UC and CC to the cloud and then layering in other capabilities. The challenge is that managing telecom services from multiple providers is very complicated.
Bandwidth’s 2023 Enterprise Communications Landscape study quantified the complexity. The survey of over 1,000 enterprise IT leaders worldwide revealed that over 90% felt that managing communications systems is a significant challenge for their organizations. The biggest problem is trying to decide between choice and ease of deployment, particularly for global companies.
One option is to cobble together the different providers for different needs. That might mean a separate UCaaS, CCaaS and AI vendor along with a carrier per country. Then companies have to manage the interconnections at a global level.
The other option is to choose a single cloud communication provider that can offer all the required functions. This might work in the short term but what happens if they are slow to roll out new features? Or the business moves into a country the vendor doesn’t operate in?
The first option leads to slow deployments and disjointed management while option two lacks flexibility and can be expensive. This is choosing the lesser of two evils.
For more information, also see: Digital Transformation Guide
Multi-Vendor or Single Vendor: Lesser of Two Evils?
Bandwidth Maestro is an open platform that enables customers to choose their favorite UCaaS or CCaaS provider and then easily add in the advanced capabilities they need. Because Bandwidth is the underlying network provider that powers almost all communications, companies can streamline connectivity to and between key platforms.
Maestro has four categories of services:
- Global network: Emergency calling, number management and global carrier coverage.
- Core voice modules: In-app voice calling (WebRTC), insight and analytics, enterprise voice (SIP/PSTN).
- Add-on modules: Fraud and spoof detection and integration with voice authentication engines, and a visual call flow builder.
- Connect modules: UCaaS and CCaaS carrier connectivity via their Duet service and conversational AI integrations.
On a pre-briefing, Bandwidth provided a demonstration in which a global organization picked their preferred CCaaS provider, used Bandwidth Duet for global connectivity and call verification/fraud detection, Cognigy for conversational AI, and Pindrop for voice authentication.
Bandwidth Maestro: Simplified Migration, Consistent Communications
Maestro is configurable through a visual builder and is available at launch in 38 countries where Bandwidth’s cloud has full PSTN replacement. Some of the more valuable use cases for Maestro include:
- Simplified migration from legacy on-prem systems to CCaaS and UCaaS platforms.
- Rapid integration of conversational AI capabilities into contact centers. This includes both speech to text and text to speech tools.
- Reduction in fraud by utilizing call verification integrated into SIP trunks.
- Custom call flows across multiple cloud communication vendors through a no-code visual flow builder.
- Communications consistency across the globe by integrating once into the Bandwidth cloud and taking advantage of the pre-existing integrations with global carriers.
- Customer specific-insights via dashboards and inbox alerts to monitor and troubleshoot using call logs, quality indicators and call/message responses.
The world of telecom is more complicated than ever before. The rise of cloud communications has enabled more vendors to offer UC, CC and AI services over the top, which is great for businesses as it creates more choice and faster innovation. The downside is having to bring all the capabilities together. Bandwidth’s Maestro orchestrates all the necessary services and simplifies deployment via its pre-integrations.