The Future of Channel Strategy: The Critical Role of Analytics and AI
Tony Martino, Chief Executive Officer of Tollring provides insights on the influence of AI and its prospects within the channel.
The Integration of Analytics and AI
Delivering support for any new product or service is essential. In particular, when dealing with more innovative or technologically advanced tools, vendors need to illustrate the benefits and make it easy for their partners to capitalise on opportunities. At the same time, channel partners need to expand their understanding of the solutions that are available in the market and build their awareness of the exciting possibilities available, or risk missing opportunities.
For our partners to succeed, we make our solutions increasingly easy to sell, provision, support and bill. Our most successful partners are those that deliver analytics bundled in their overall commercial proposition, demonstrate the combined value and clearly articulate customer benefits for the whole solution.
Whilst analytics and AI technology have been around for many years, they are now more powerful and accessible than ever before. The channel providers that have embraced analytics and AI technology are reaping the benefits. Analytics is a great differentiator, and AI powers it further, creating great use cases and stories that capture the imagination and make it far more exciting to sell.
Transforming SMB Communication and Collaboration
We see huge opportunity within the informal contact centre space, where customer-facing teams and knowledge workers across SMB organisations can leverage communications analytics to drive revenues through customer satisfaction, loyalty and retention. AI-powered cloud recording extends analytics further, both driving ARPU and ARR for partners and delivering conversational insights at scale to end customers for an in-depth understanding of customer experience. Collaboration analytics delivers yet more value to SMBs through visibility of internal collaboration.
Many SMBs are adopting Microsoft Teams and operating in a muti-vendor UC environment with the expectation of analytics and recording tools that they have been used to on traditional phone systems. We see a huge opportunity for partners as SMBs search for apps and innovative solutions to compliment and add value to Microsoft Teams.
The Underutilized Potential of CCaaS in SMEs
Large contact centres can be complex, and typically see partners hook together solutions from multiple vendors. It is therefore unsurprising that few see themselves as specialists.
However, with the latest powerful technologies available in the cloud, solutions are now far easier to create and build – and are much more accessible to SMEs. This means that partners don’t need to be specialists to be able to claim opportunities in the space, and we are seeing many channel players that wouldn’t consider themselves to be contact centre specialists making excellent gains from the sector. Understanding these solutions and delivering them with competence represents a great opportunity for those partners that see the value.
Empowering Resellers and MSPs: Leveraging AI and Analytics for Enhanced Customer Insights
Using AI and analytics within a reseller or MSP’s own business will enable them to maximise their own customer experience whilst learning how to sell it with confidence. A win-win.
Resellers/MSPs can gain a greater understanding of their own customers’ call journeys and their experience in dealing with their company, such as how quickly a customer query is resolved. Coupling call recording with analytics empowers further, building a picture of what customers want and how to meet their expectations. The addition of AI technology automates analysis at scale, highlighting business critical insight. Finally, APIs can assist in delivering the right insights to the right people in the way that meets their needs, and around existing systems and processes.
Strategic AI Deployment: Tollring’s Journey to Enhancing Partner Capabilities with Advanced Analytics
Tollring’s aim is to deliver solutions that are out-of-the-box with powerful AI-capabilities that are cost effective, reliable and accurate.
Our new AI-powered cloud call recording solution, Record AI, is a platform-agnostic call recording service that facilitates compliance and delivers automation of analysis and conversational intelligence at scale to a provider’s product portfolio. Call recordings, and the associated analysis can be delivered by the service providers in various ways via a marketplace or in their own ecosystem via API.
Analytics is already a differentiator and AI technology is used in many of our everyday business tools already, such as Microsoft Teams, often without the user even realising it. As demand increases it will become more mainstream, and more accessible to SMEs.