Post Lockdown Updates

It has certainly been an interesting last 3 months and we have definitely seen a big shift toward Cloud phone services during this time with a lot of customers moving away from traditional on-premise PBX systems to Cloud based solutions.  We have seen strong growth with both our Cloud PBX service, Web Conferencing and Microsoft Teams voice integration.

During the lockdown we have worked hard adding new features to our platforms along with some new products and services and these are outlined below in a bit more detail:

Broadband
We have launched a new Unlimited 500Mb plan giving customers a big speed boost over the previous 200Mb plan.  We are still aiming to launch our Gigabit plan in the coming month or so but we didn't want to launch that until we were fully ready network wise with several upgrades required to handover and peering links.  However, we believe that the 500Mb plan will be more than suitable for most SMEs.

Web Conferencing
During lockdown we added more functionality to our web conferencing solution including meeting scheduling, conference group creation and also some new upgrade options for Basic, Premium and Enterprise conferences.  The latter allowing users to customise their conference with their own branding and logos.  Our free 5 person conference still exists for any account that has an existing Cloud line with Hero.

Cloud PBX
Our Cloud PBX service has had several enhancements over the last 3 months to improve the level of functionality available for customers.  This includes the following changes:

• Simultaneous Ring  -  We have now extended the Sim Ring service to allow up to 10 phones to be dialed off a single Sim Ring Group
• Remote Extension Options  -  Customers can now program and access another extension's settings by using the new *44 remote extension option which allows you to program settings using star codes or make calls out through another extension on the account.
• Distinctive Ring  -  Internal and Group Calls can be identified separately now and an Alert-Info header can be sent to handsets that support this feature allowing you to have distinctive ringing for these types of calls
• Call Screening for call diversions  -  We have added a new option to call screening allowing the user to divert a call to say a mobile phone on a ring group but only connect the call if the user accepts the incoming call.  This means you can add mobiles to Sim Ring groups for example and avoid going to the voicemail on that mobile when they are out of coverage or turned off.
• Caller ID presentation changes  -  We have added further support for the P-Asserted-Identity headers allowing users to present non-Hero caller ID information on diverted calls for example.
• More profile options  -  Users can now enable shared line appearance, block private calls and also block overseas calls or expensive overseas calls at a global level by applying these settings against their profile.
• Global contact list/Speed Dial  -  We have added a global contact list option with the ability to have global speed dials across the account by dialing ** followed by the speed dial number.  The added benefit to this is that any calls coming in from those contacts will show the caller's name automatically on the users phone screen automatically making it easy to identify known contacts.

Queue Reporting
We have added powerful new queue reporting to our system now so that any customers using queues will automatically get access to reports showing call stats for each of their agents including total talk times, average call durations, average wait times for callers and call abandonment rates and much more.  We aim to keep improving our reporting to make it easier for customer to transition from traditional PBX systems to our Cloud.  You can view these reports under the Account/Reports screen

Console Screen
We now have a console screen allowing users to see the current status of all lines on their account including if they are online, offline or busy on a call.  The Console screen also shows any active calls and how long they have been in-progress for.  This is useful for people to see how many calls are sitting currently in a queue for example.  You can also do a click to dial by clicking on a number and this will call back to your number and then connect to that user.  You can also do a call pickup by clicking on a 'ringing' call within the console.  We aim to improve this console screen in the future as well!

Web Connect Dialer
We had a bit of fun during lockdown playing with some web based calling and conferencing tools and out of that came our new 'Web Connect' dialer which allows users to make and receive phone calls directly from their web browser using WebRTC technology.  The Web Dialer not only allows for voice calls but you can also share a secure link to this and setup a video conference with other users in their web browsers.  The new web connect dialer can be found under the Voice menu.

Microsoft Teams
We have continued to develop our Microsoft Teams solution and have added some more options for customers.  To further reduce costs for users we now have the option of adding DDI lines into Microsoft Teams for accounts with more than 10 Teams users on them.  This means the user can add additional Teams lines without our Cloud PBX features or another channel included.  This can help reduce costs significantly for Teams deployments that do not need dedicated channels for all of their users or access to our Hero Cloud features like call recording etc.

Phone Provisioning
We have now improved our phone provisioning tool and have added Grandstream to the phone provisioning options.  We will continue to keep adding more phone models and will soon add Fanvil to the list of supported phones as well.