2021 Roadmap Recap: AVOXI’s Biggest Releases of the Year
What a year it's been! AVOXI launched several integrated features into market in 2021, expanding pathways for global businesses to tap into its award-winning number inventory to fuel faster interactions, all on the tech-stack applications our customers use most.
Communications are continuing to evolve at a rapid pace, and heading into 2021 there was no slowing down. Following the pandemic, many companies realized they had to evolve their global communications...and quickly. Business leaders underwent significant change the past year in order to keep their business running, support their remote workforce all while maintaining high levels of growth and customer satisfaction.
Knowing our customers were being challenged on the front lines, we focused our development roadmap this year on features and functionality that could simplify how they communicate globally - regardless of where they were located or their preferred technologies. From diversified SIP forwarding capabilities, Microsoft Teams integration, Voice APIs, IP security measures, and enhanced reporting tools, our 2021 roadmap curated new pathways for customers to tap into our expansive number inventory. Keep reading to learn more about our biggest releases to date.
January: IVR Reporting
Providing a holistic view of where customers come through on a virtual attendant helps business leaders analyze inbound call strategies and improve the customer experience (CX). Coming into 2021, we invested heavily into our IVR software, giving our customers advanced views into their IVR analytics.
With this new reporting feature, customers can easily interpret prompt setups and identify areas of success and concern within their VoIP IVR, including the areas receiving the most traffic, potential loops that could negatively impact CX, and high call abandonment zones.
March: SIP Forwarding, Microsoft Teams Direct Routing, & SLA
Have an existing CCaaS provider or PBX phone system but lacking the call quality or rates your business needs? Need a way to measure your SLA in real-time to ensure customer service levels are being consistently met? These were two enhancements we introduced at the close of Q1 2021.
SIP Forwarding
With our new intuitive SIP integration, customers now have a seamless way to manage business voice from within their preferred voice environment. While we’ve offered SIP-based connectivity for years now, in March we released a simplified experience for integrating global business numbers and supporting cloud services migrations without sacrificing quality - no matter their tech stack.
AVOXI voice can now be easily integrated into popular PBX and contact center solutions like Five9, Nice inContact, Avaya, 3CX, and even Microsoft Teams. By connecting the two technologies, businesses can easily provision and activate numbers, make and receive calls from more countries, and unify their communications for better productivity and performance.
Microsoft Teams Direct Routing
With the rapid adoption of Microsoft Teams this year, more and more international businesses were looking for additional paths to improve the platform’s voice capabilities. In Q1, we introduced our MS Teams Direct Routing integration to allow customers to easily provision numbers in 170+ countries compared to MS Teams’ 26 countries. With improved call quality and expanded voice features - all at lower rates - this has been one of our most popular features this year!
Service Level Reporting
Businesses that measure service level see immediate improvements across customer satisfaction, revenue growth, internal process optimizations, and team morale.
AVOXI customers can now measure this critical KPI through our Advanced Analytics dashboard, making it easier to track and provide actionable insights across your teams. By monitoring service level, you’ll also be able to improve the average speed of answer (ASA) and abandon rate (AR).
April: Bulk Call Forwarding Rules
Global enterprises lean on flexible and convenient workflows to make updates to their extended phone systems. Bulk Call Forwarding Rules was released in April, making multiple number configurations and call forwarding rules quick and painless for those with high volume.
Calls that go unanswered due to long wait times don’t bode well and lead to a poor customer experience. On the AVOXI platform, customers can distribute calls to a mobile device, external number, email, voicemail, or premium routes like a virtual attendant, extension, or team to make sure every call is answered within an appropriate amount of time.
May: TrueLocal & Microsoft Teams Cloud SBC
Customer expectations are evolving and growing every day as international businesses expand into omnichannel communications. In May, AVOXI rolled out two highly-anticipated features: TrueLocalTM and AVOXI’s cloud SBC for Microsoft Teams.
TrueLocalTM
Tapping into new markets is hard enough as it is. That’s why we introduced our TrueLocalTM voice offering this year, delivering a full PSTN replacement with local caller ID for inbound and outbound dialing. With coverage in hard-to-reach countries like Brazil, Saudi Arabia, China, The Netherlands, and Russia, AVOXI customers now have a better way to connect with their global customers, regardless of where they’re located.
In fact, customers are 10X more likely to answer calls from companies using local numbers.
Cloud SBC Solution for MS Teams
Expanding on our release of MS Teams Direct Routing in March, we introduced our own hosted session border controller (SBC) in May, providing better connectivity with remote agents and customers in geographies where Microsoft Calling Plans can’t reach.
Purpose-built to simplify the SIP integration pathway, AVOXIs cloud SBC solution removes the barrier for customers without their own certified session border controller to utilize voice in Microsoft Teams.
June: Call Transfer Reports
Sometimes callers select the wrong department...it happens. And when this occurs, a call transfer is necessary. This past June we released a new view within our Analytics dashboard - Call Transfer Reports.
Business leaders can now easily track and manage call transfer details made by teams and agents. Use this report to see who did the transfer, who received it, and was the call transferred in a warm or blind manner.
July: Priority Routing & SIP Trunking
With customer expectations at an all-time high, routing calls to the right agent the first time is critical. In July, we launched Priority Routing and SIP Trunking into our cloud communications software.
Priority Routing
Priority routing allows businesses to route loyal customers to a dedicated team of agents to deliver a top-notch, personalized experience. AVOXI’s new functionality allows you to create specific call routing tactics to ensure your VIP customers get their questions answered quickly.
When a call is tagged VIP, it automatically places the call at the head of the queue, giving your most valued customers shorter wait times and a better experience.
SIP Trunks
SIP Trunks add another connection point for global businesses with a focus on outbound calling strategies. It’s a popular service with proven effectiveness to cut local and long-distance calling costs without having to replace an existing phone system.
The setup for SIP Trunks is easy at AVOXI. And you can have as many as needed to support your outbound teams. Easily integrate SIP Trunks with your PBX (including MS Teams) or third-party VoIP provider to bridge these systems together.
August: Voice APIs
Global communications don’t always allow for a one-size-fits-all solution. AVOXIs Voice APIs provide a programmable approach for enterprises looking to instantly extend their global reach from within their own applications.
As of August, customers can easily tap into AVOXI’s established network of local carriers in 170+ countries with carrier-grade call quality to guarantee scalable voice service and connectivity from virtually any platform. Our suite of APIs is tailored to each business’s unique needs and includes inventory look-up, number provisioning, configuration, call detail, and call costing.
September: TrueLocal APAC Expansion
Local voice connections are notoriously difficult to acquire in the Asia-Pacific region for international organizations. Building on our release of TrueLocalTM in May, we expanded our local voice offering throughout APAC, breaking barriers and delivering local caller ID in 20+ hard-to-reach cities including Beijing, Jakarta, Manila, Bangkok, Singapore, and more.
AVOXI’s team of telecom experts and our strong relations with local carriers enable us to deliver where other providers can’t.
October: TLS/SRTP Encryption
An omnichannel communication system is essential for global businesses to connect with their customers on whatever channel they use. SIP voice is a necessity for this integration, and business leaders want reassurance that their communications are well protected and secured.
In October, enterprise-grade protection TLS (transport layer security) and SRTP (secure real-time transport protocol) encryptions were debuted into the AVOXI network to safeguard businesses from disruption. With geo-redundancy and high-quality routing, you can ensure that your business is always online.
November: Password & Session Activity Controls
With call recording software and payment collection services, your business holds access to a variety of sensitive customer information. Your customers are trusting you to keep their PINs, addresses, credit cards, account details, and emails safe from malicious activity.
Continuing to build out our reliable and secure network, we’ve adjusted the security control setting to maintain PCI-DSS compliance. When updating these settings, you can configure your teams’ inactivity timeouts, password rotation, minimum password age and reuse limit, and bad login lockout to mitigate risk and better protect your customers’ personal identification details.
Up Next: Skills-Based Routing & Call Insights Dashboard
It’s the most wonderful time of the year, and the perfect opportunity to introduce two highly anticipated features: Skills-Based Routing & Call Insights Dashboards.
Skills-Based Routing
Skills-Based Routing plays an important role in the experience a customer has with your brand. AVOXI makes it easy to improve customer service by assigning common skills like spoken language, product expertise, and geography to specific agents. When calls come in, your callers are automatically distributed to an agent that possesses those skills. It’s just another way that contact center leaders can ensure the best-in-class service to their customers at all times.
Call Insights Dashboards
Communication downtime is frustrating and can affect your bottom line. With AVOXI’s Call Insights Dashboards, businesses can see how their voice quality is performing across multiple departments and regions.
Traffic reporting analyzes voice data that could influence your contact center KPIs. This new advanced reporting shows an aggregate view of your organization’s bandwidth, any latency or jitter issues, and metrics like uptime, first call resolution, and NPS that form your service level agreement.
Delivering Mission-Critical Communications for a Greater Customer Experience
AVOXI’s global communications platform delivers mission-critical communications your business can rely on. Throughout 2021, we’ve focused on enabling our enterprise customers to seamlessly tap into our expansive voice network to enable their business operations, regardless of where they’re located or the technologies they use.
As we head into a new year, our development team is already mapping out new enhancements and functionalities that align with customer needs. Have a request for a particular feature for next year? We’d love for you to share your thoughts at [email protected].
