Michel Ravasio - 8 juin, 2021 - 6 ’ read

Your sigh of relief: Imagicle UCX Cloud Suite.

Cloud UC, covid-19, Healthcare, Imagicle UCX Cloud Suite, Smart Working

Everyone loves a good story, and today I'm here to tell you one. I'm Michel, business development manager at Imagicle, and today I will tell you how Imagicle combines the best technologies available with the passion of happy people to bring value to customers of any size and industry. I promise it won't be the sales pitch of a cloud seller.

How the story begins.

I got my first « real job » in 2002: NOC operator for a service provider in Milan, Italy. The job itself was pretty boring, but man, I had nice bandwidth for online gaming! And thank goodness for that, because I often had to cover night shifts, just monitoring for potential alarms coming from the data center below my chair, and rarely going downstairs to perform some basic tasks like swapping a backup tape.

I remember it was quite an impressive environment, and in fact, bigger prospects were sometimes allowed in to visit. They would get the sales pitch about how safe and advanced the hosting environment was: cutting edge racks, redundant power sources, fire extinguishing systems, and a war room where knowledgeable operators would professionally monitor the situation 24/7 with no distractions ;)

Well, that’s where I first met my colleague Antonio Greco: he was already a senior sysadmin, part of the escalation team I had to call in case some of those monitoring icons turned red. He made that job more interesting for me in two ways: he started teaching me stuff, so I wouldn’t call him at night, and sometimes he played those online games with me.

Fast forward to 2021 and here we are: both Antonio and I moved to Florida, we are still friends, we still work together, and I still need his help when a customer has some tricky technical question! After all, I’m a sales guy but he is the Team Leader for Imagicle Advanced Services in the USA.

But while certain things don’t change, others do: today we are both bald, we both enjoy streaming services subscriptions, online games, and cloud services from our 5G phones; instead of struggling with torrent downloads and NAS hidden folders, and we both assist customers migrating to the Imagicle UCX Cloud Suite.

Imagicle solutions: explained.

Today’s cloud services are nothing like those web farms of the dotcom era. Today customers can rely on better bandwidth, encrypted connections, compression protocols, private instances of server-less micro services, with automated operations, high availability, and elastic resources for unlimited scalability… or, in simple words, they can just plug in and get things done.

I want you to picture a real-life scenario that in the past year has become unfortunately pretty common.

Meet Susan, Eric, Lisa, and Neal.

Susan works in the Customer Services Team of a healthcare organization (by the way, have you read our brochure about Imagicle solutions for Healthcare?), and every day she greets and assists callers in a cheerful and professional way, on her modern desk phone.

Eric, the Team Supervisor, is very happy with how she operates, and he often talks about Susan’s calls as training examples for the whole team. Eric and Susan are both proud of their job because they know they somehow represent the first friendly voice for people who call in search of help. The prompt information they provide is helping not only patients and families but also the workflow of the entire organization.

As a matter of fact, Lisa, Medical Doctor, can fully dedicate herself to her patients, without worrying too much about bookings, insurances, and bureaucracy in general. She gets calls, too, but most of them are from colleagues, or correctly pre-qualified and transferred by Eric’s team; also, she can easily operate the desktop computer and the fax machine that she shares with a few colleagues.

Then something happens and the almost perfect workflow gets heavily challenged.

The number of patients increases drastically, and so does the number of faxes and calls.

Lisa keeps dedicating herself to her patients, like a true hero, but now she needs to move from a location to another and she needs to send and receive information even more urgently, no matter where she is.

Meanwhile, Susan and her colleagues, including Eric, have been asked to work from home. They don’t serve emergency calls, yet they have to inform, reassure and guide people to correctly access new services.

It’s a very stressful situation: Susan was not prepared to serve such calls from a laptop at home, and share rapidly changing information without the comforting presence of her colleagues. Eric was not prepared to tune and monitor new service queues and announcements from home, always ensuring the service quality deserved by a population in need.

Fortunately, the whole collaboration industry reacts quickly, with a variety of incredible initiatives: new ideas, new workarounds, new products, free trials, free licenses, free consultancies, and more.

Susan, Eric, and Lisa are given new tools, sometimes very easy to adopt, like those Imagicle apps, and they can accomplish their duties and serve their patients in a streamlined way. As the initial crisis is being managed, they can smile again and joke about how nice but also difficult can be to work from home, with pets and kids.

I’m also present in this story. Not as a patient, thank goodness, but as a caller: a resident looking for info on vaccines, a father looking for info on school programs, an Italian looking for info on travel policies.

And I’m part of this story also as a smart worker: from my daughter’s desk, I had the privilege to assist customers in need like Susan, Eric, and Lisa. I provided consultancy, but of course, the tech stuff was taken care of by Antonio 🙂 who’s been working from his desk (actually in the same condo I live in, here in Fort Lauderdale, FL).

Imagicle allowed us to provide solutions, free trials, and free demos. Imagicle allowed us to provide peace of mind.

Now that you know a bit more about the Cloud and about our Imagicle UCX Cloud Suite, it’s time to talk about what’s inside it: our UC apps, the beating heart of our Suite, that can be installed directly on the Cloud or smoothly transitioned to it with the same interface and the same amazing user experience, thanks to the dedicated gadgets for Jabber and Webex.

We provided our Attendant Console and Contact Manager solutions: Susan can now see incoming calls from different services queues, recognize the caller and greet accordingly, search for colleagues and check for their availability before transferring the calls. From her laptop, without a VPN.

We provided our MiFID II, GDPR, PCI-DSS, HIPAA-compliant Call Recording, with Advanced Queueing and Auto Attendant, fully integrated with our Attendant Console: Eric can now modify IVR behaviors and announcements without an engineer. From his tablet or laptop he can fine-tune his service queues, monitor and assist Susan and the team, check KPIs but also whisper coach. And he can playback recordings from encrypted, elastic storage, wherever he is.

We provided our HIPAA and GDPR-compliant Digital Fax solution: Lisa can now send and receive private faxes from her laptop, her tablet, or her phone.

We provided our Call Analytics solution: the organization can now customize and schedule tons of reports, providing precious insights about call volumes, peaks, and trends. And from Spring 2021, it can also dig into KPIs about device usage and adoption, so that it’s always clear if investments are right or not. This will help a lot, as call services are being refined for even better assistance.

All those solutions could have been deployed on a single server on-premises, but we are glad this healthcare organization opted for the Imagicle UCX Cloud Suite, even more reliable, scalable, and secure.

Being part of this story allowed me to realize a couple facts.

We are humans.

Collaboration, and voice in particular, is a crucial aspect of every business, in any industry. I served somehow similar needs for financial institutions, cities and counties, higher education institutions, and even police departments. Imagicle UCX Cloud Suite is modular, easy to use, and manage: it is the most complete set of must-have apps, packed up in a single pane of glass, loaded with security features and regulatory compliances, including PCI-DSS, MiFID II, HIPAA, and GDPR.

Change happens.

Any service can experience sudden increases or decreases in demand. The availability must be granted instantly during peaks, without imposing long-term investments or precluding flexibility for consolidation and simplification. Imagicle UCX Cloud Suite is instantly available as a private instance. It offers elastic resources as needed, including unlimited storage at no extra cost. Apps subscriptions are flexible and licensing is granular.

The best technology is invisible, and it just works

Customers want to focus on their core business, not on servers. Imagicle UCX Cloud Suite integrates easily and natively with a variety of calling platforms and collaboration tools, such as Cisco WebEx and Microsoft Teams. It is fully managed and monitored, daily backed up, and constantly updated (which is good for new functionalities but also for security improvements).

Human passion is a vital ingredient.

Sure, in these months we delivered innovation, but what my customers appreciated the most was our listening and caring. We gave them quick answers, spot-on demos, free POCs, efficient Advanced Services, and outstanding Tech Support, with 3 plans available, proactive support, a dedicated expert, and more.

For this, I have to thank Antonio, Carlos, Maurizio, Enzo, Dario, Andrea, Andrew, Giorgio, Stephen, Jaime, Ettore, and the other 90 components of the amazing Imagicle family.

PS: oh, you might be wondering… What about Neal? Well, Neal is you: our partner and reseller who brings us new challenges from customers in need. Or the Service Provider who wants to bridge Imagicle UCX Cloud Suite to a wider and richer collaboration proposition. If that is you, and you want to know more, get in touch!