Intermedia introduces advanced telephony features for Microsoft Teams and introduces new AI and archiving features for the contact center.
Intermedia, a cloud communications and collaboration solutions provider, just launched its latest product, Unite for Microsoft Teams Advanced. The company says this new offering enhances Microsoft Teams’ functionality by integrating advanced communication features directly into the Teams environment.
I discussed this news with Intermedia’s SVP of product marketing, Mark Sher, and several product marketing team members. They walked me through this new offering, the latest on the company’s service provider initiative, its approach to AI for the contact center, and archiving for contact centers.
Let’s start by examining Unite for Microsoft Teams Advanced.
Improving business communication and collaboration
Sher told me the company has been in the Teams interoperability market since 2020, with two solutions. The first solution, ‘Unite For Teams,’ is embedded within Teams, and the second solution, ‘Unite With Teams,’ is a telephony companion for customers using Teams for collaboration.
The company also sells another solution, which includes separate Teams and communication apps. He told me that they have now merged the two solutions to offer a single, complete telephony application to run seamlessly inside the Teams environment without needing to purchase the Microsoft Teams Phone license. Moving forward, Intermedia will discontinue ‘Unite With Teams’ and deemphasize ‘Unite For Teams.’
Unite for Microsoft Teams Advanced introduces features to improve business communication and collaboration, including enterprise-grade voice calling, SMS messaging capabilities, and integrations with CRM systems. These additions enable businesses to consolidate their communication tools within the Microsoft Teams platform, potentially reducing the need for multiple separate applications.
One significant advantage of this solution is its ability to provide a unified communication experience without requiring a separate Microsoft Teams Phone license. This can save large companies a substantial amount of money. Savings can be had as Teams Phone licenses are very expensive when compared to calling partners as are Teams toll costs. The product also includes a 30-day rolling archive of communications, which can be crucial for businesses needing to maintain records for compliance or reference purposes. In addition, it offers global connectivity so companies can maintain seamless communication across different regions.
Enhancing the native capabilities of Teams
Intermedia is aiming Unite for Microsoft Teams Advanced at businesses that rely heavily on Microsoft Teams for their internal and external communications. By enhancing Teams’ native capabilities with advanced telephony features, such as, enterprise grade cloud phone system, SMS, and advance call center capabilities, Intermedia provides a more comprehensive communication solution.
The solution includes features that ensure communication remains operational even during service disruptions, allowing users to access Intermedia’s mobile and browser apps. With the CrowdStrike global outage and cord-cutting at the Paris Olympics, there has been a renewed focus on the importance of reliability and business continuity. Intermedia brings those capabilities to Microsoft Teams Advanced.
Intermedia’s service provider initiative
Sher also provided an update on the company’s progress with its service provider initiative. He told me that Intermedia has worked with service providers for several decades, but in the last 6-9 months, the company has sharpened its focus with several recent wins.
“We’ve signed up many service providers,” he told me. “The service providers we are talking to like that they can update their offering to a highly competitive, AI-based solution, based on Spark AI, while retaining their brand, continuing to own the customer relationship and driving the margins they require”
While many communications companies focus on delivering services through service providers, most are voice-only and offer services to consumers. Intermedia is business-first and enables service providers to quickly pivot from older premise-based solutions to modern cloud-based solutions for their business customers.
Contact center AI and archiving
Robert Oscanyan, senior director of product marketing at Intermedia, told me about the contact center AI features the company has developed.
He also stated that AI is not limited to contact centers at Intermedia. “AI plays a central role in our product roadmap across our entire platform,” Oscanyan said. “We’re making significant investments in AI to help our customers be more efficient, productive, enable better customer experiences and ultimately run better businesses.”
Some examples of these capabilities include transcribing and summarizing phone calls, as well as the ability to redact personally identifiable information (PII), as well as features that help the business understand customer sentiment. Intermedia’s AI products also provide tools for employees to receive quick and accurate answers to questions.
Deepan Hariharasegaran, Intermedia’s product marketing director, then shared an update on archiving for contact centers. He told me that the company’s solution allows organizations to adhere to regulatory compliance requirements, address disputes and complaints, satisfy legal obligations, enhance frontline user performance, preserve knowledge for continuity, and leverage data intelligence and insights.
Intermedia’s Archiving solution is a compliance solution, so it assists companies in meeting their requirements. For example, HIPPA requires the archiving of customer correspondence for 10 years, which this solution satisfies.
The solution offers flexible retention periods between 30 days and ten years. Hariharasegaran told me the data isn’t locked away once it’s archived. “We provide instant access to your data, whether you archive the data for 30 days or up to 10 years,” he said. “In fact, we have one customer that wants to archive the data for 14 years—with instant access, however old the data is. And the same thing is true with search results within milliseconds.” This is a significant differentiator as access to stored information is a critical component, whereas others store it without tools to help access the information.
Some final thoughts
The Unite for Microsoft Teams Advanced launch is a crucial move for Intermedia — bringing its Teams offering together to offer true unified communications. After all, unified communications should translate into multiple apps.
The additional focus on the company’s service provider program creates an additional, predictable revenue stream that can help mitigate against many of the ebbs and flows in the communications space.
