Welcome to 2020!
We’re excited for all that 2020 has in store for you and for us here at Converged! We hope you enjoy this post as we take a quick look back to 2019 and share our thoughts about the new year ahead!
Let's Take a Quick Look At our 2019 Accomplishments
Maintained our Platinum Mitel Partner status
Not only have we maintained our Platinum status, but we remain on the Mitel Partner Advisory board and we were a guest panelist at the Mitel Analyst and Consultant’s 2019 Summit to discuss Digital transformation in the customer experience journey.
We became a RingCentral Premier Partner
This is the highest partner status level and we're excited to offer RingCentral's cloud solutions to our customers. You can read about our Partner announcement here.
We’ve officially branded our IT Professional Services offerings SwamI.T.
We made it a goal to better communicate and market these services we offer to you. We did well and will continue to share with you about these services. You can read about our IT Services here.
New Customer Success Team
We’ve also created a customer success team to strengthen our customer-partner relationships. We've always been customer-focused, but this team helps us better serve you the customer.
We Were Honored to Become the Chosen Mitel partner for the Chicago Cubs!
Not only are we the Mitel partner for the Milwaukee Brewers, but also for the Chicago Cubs! Recognize the name on the marquee below? What other sports teams will choose Converged for their partner in 2020? Stay tuned…
Now, let's take a look at what we see lies ahead in 2020...
Hosted Cloud-based Phone Adoption Grows, Even with Contact Centers
2019 solidified the realities of a major shift occurring in the telecommunications market. The shift to hosted phones is nothing new obviously, but many medium and especially enterprise businesses have held off for a variety of valid reasons. That is currently changing and we’re seeing it first-hand.
You’ll see in 2020 more talk from us about omni-channel functionality (read about it here), business process optimization, and cloud migration in general. We won’t go into full detail in this post, but you may want to sign up for our blog posts and newsletters here to keep up on these trends and how they relate to your business.
We’ve seen improvements in the reliability and stability of those on hosted platforms, and we’ve also seen improvements in the features available that many businesses are looking for.
Both RingCentral and Mitel have focused heavily on the R&D of their hosted contact center platforms to provide as close feature parody what businesses use with their contact center onsite pbx.
We won’t go into more specifics, so make sure to read our blogs and stay in the know with us.
New Customer TAMs
Along with the growing shift to cloud, we’ve recognized that we must adapt as well for you. Not everyone is ready to move to cloud, but many are and some already have. We want to make sure you know we are here to provide the resources you need to find the right provider and make a successful migration to cloud.
This is why at the end of last year we started making plans to strategically and methodically implement Technical Account Managers (TAMs) for cloud customers in 2020.
Our internal support staff are undergoing training to provide advanced services. The assistance of Technical Account Managers will apply to new cloud customer accounts acquired in 2020. For existing cloud customers, TAM assistance won't be available until your next renewal date, or when we believe assistance is in your best interest. Certain factors will be considered during this roll out such as the size and complexity of each cloud account, specifically those with contact center environments.
Many of our existing cloud customers already have standing relationships with us and are acutely familiar already with their hosted solutions and would not require this added service.
Our IT Professional Services Continue to Grow
While this isn’t a surprise for most customers, it still deserves repeating. Our IT Professional services division (network services, carrier services, virtualization, application development, hosted email & business applications) is continuing to grow as more customers learn and take advantage of these partner services. We expect 2020 to be another profitable year in this area as well.
What Else is in Store for 2020?
We know from experience to never predict the future because in our industry something is always changing. Acquisitions, mergers, new technologies, end of sale and end of life announcements… it’s never a dull moment!
Through our email newsletters, blog/news posts, and social media sharing we’ll continue to communicate with you and our followers about topics relevant to your business.
We wish everyone great health and prosperity for the year ahead!
Yours Truly,
The Converged Technology Professionals Team