Accelerate your Amazon Connect deployment with Poly headsets and devices

Contact centers globally are amid a seismic shift where their organizations increasingly are coming under pressure as they must adapt to new realities driven by data security, customer preferences and less time to test, plan and execute new IT projects – all the while having to ensure customer satisfaction and experience scores remain high.

Upgrading an existing on-premise contact center requires the ability to replicate cloud business benefits in your own data center or private cloud. The requirement for compute capacity and ability to ideate, develop, test, and roll out features rapidly has become a competitive differentiator, if not a necessity. The emergence of born in the cloud contact center vendors like Amazon Web Services means any competitor, whether big or small, will have access to a full set of features and capabilities which previously were reserved for large enterprises who had the financial ability to build and host large on-premise data and telephony infrastructure centers.

Poly is thrilled to announce the arrival of the Poly-integrated Amazon Connect Contact Control Panel (CCP), an industry first Quick Start for headsets with Amazon Connect.

The Quick Start is accessible on the AWS Quick Start landing page and was developed by Poly in collaboration with AWS so that our customers can accelerate their Amazon Connect deployment and ensure a uniform user experience with Poly headsets and USB adaptors from the get-go.

Contact center agents, supervisors and managers can expect a new and improved user experience with the Poly-integrated Amazon Connect Contact Control Panel such as:

• Call answer/end, volume adjustment seamlessly synchronized between Poly headsets and agent’s PC
• Quick disconnect/mute recognition, including removal of user from queue and automatic change of status
• New and improved appearance of CCP with Poly animated Branding
• Data flow through to Plantronics Manager Pro SaaS service
• Identification of Poly headset/device connected to Amazon Connect

IT departments and managers also benefit from the new Poly-integrated Amazon CCP Quick Start as it reduces and simplifies hundreds of manual procedures into a few simple steps that help accelerate and automate your Amazon Connect deployment.

Some of the key Poly benefits for IT departments are:

• AWS Solution Architect reviewed and approved Quick Start which is an automated reference deployment using AWS CloudFormation templates to roll out key technologies following AWS best practice.
• Poly Quick Start Reference Deployment Guide
• Uniform user experience irrespective of Poly headset deployed
• Platform for standardization of headsets and devices
• Global footprint with best in class support and warranty
• Migrate legacy headset assets, track and manage these with Plantronics Manager Pro optional SaaS service (runs on AWS)
  • Access to telemetry data from each headset and agent
  • Track and manage daily noise exposure levels and investigate acoustic incidents

We are also excited to announce a brand new set of APIs for Amazon Connect for developers which is live on the Poly developer site. The sample code and APIs can be leveraged by our partners to develop headset integrations for Amazon Connect based solutions.

Amazon Connect is an easy to use omnichannel cloud contact center that helps companies provide superior customer service at a lower cost. It was originally built to give Amazon’s retail business personal, dynamic, and natural experiences for its customers. It provides a seamless experience across voice and chat for customers and agents. This includes a single set of tools for skills-based routing, powerful real-time and historical analytics, and easy-to-use intuitive management tools – all with pay-as-you-go pricing.

Poly is a global communications company that powers meaningful human connection and collaboration. Poly combines legendary audio expertise and powerful video and conferencing capabilities to overcome the distractions, complexity and distance that make communication in and out of the workplace challenging.

ClobbaDM Insights Improve Knowledge Worker Productivity and Call Quality

As my holiday becomes a distant memory, I reflect on how too much noise can distract from what’s important.  On the first night of my camping trip the noise of a typical British summer – complete with wind and rain – left me wondering what I was doing there.  Come the morning the wind and rain had gone to leave a sunny day, and for the first time I could hear the sound of the sea and remember the reason I was there.

Similarly, for IT professionals, ensuring your users have the perfect Unified Communications and Collaboration (UC&C) experience can be difficult when other factors get in the way. Only by cutting through the noise can you best support your users. This is where quality analytics tools, like Code Software’s ClobbaDM, can really shine.

Critical Insights from Clobba DM and Plantronics Manager Pro Combination

Code Software has been delivering unique UC&C solutions to businesses worldwide since 2013. We partnered with this leading supplier of analytics and management software for Microsoft Skype and Teams environments to help deliver a complete solution for customers.

Using industry leading APIs connected to Plantronics Manager Pro, Code rapidly added Poly headset inventory and firmware information directly into ClobbaDM. Combining this information with the call reporting and analytics information from the UC&C system, users have an end-to-end view of critical data.

That information empowers IT professionals to rapidly troubleshoot and diagnose problems, right down to the headset device. Call quality trends can be displayed by headset type to quickly pinpoint if certain users are using the wrong headset type for their working environment.

Multiplatform UC&C Support

With ClobbaDM supporting UC&C platforms such as Skype for Business, Cisco, and AWS — and Poly headsets either certified or compatible with these and more platforms — the Poly and Code integration ensures that you can easily monitor your complete UC&C environment from a single dashboard, no matter the platform.

With Plantronics Manager Pro you can ensure your headsets are up to date and compliant to any polices based on your security requirements and/or regional legislation.  Once set you can forget about this and concentrate on monitoring your environment. With our new Plantronics Manager Pro Onboarding and Adoption service it’s now even easier to get up and running.  Our experts will provide remote onboarding and three-monthly check-in workshops – optimizing for your environment.  This service is now available globally.

Combining Plantronics Manager Pro and ClobbaDM allows you to cultivate the most productive UC&C environment, so your users can cut through the noise and focus on what’s really important.

Now if we could just have another one of those holidays…

Today I have the pleasure of letting you all know that Plantronics has added to the Calisto family of speakerphones by introducing Calisto 7200 to the market.  This new, sleek and compact speakerphone is designed specifically for small “huddle rooms” for up to six people, to provide a meeting experience beyond compare. With the addition of Calisto 7200, our partners can now offer their customers a complete selection of audio collaboration devices: headsets, personal and small group speakerphones.

We created this product in a collaboration that began last year with Polycom, a leader in the conferencing space, as we share a mutual goal of providing users with superior user experiences. There’s no doubt the need for small conference rooms is growing quickly. In a Nemertes 2018 study, 67 percent of IT leaders are evaluating now, or planning for this year or next year, to invest in meeting rooms. Even in today’s open-office environments, the need for smaller conference and collaboration rooms is increasing.

One of the best things about this speakerphone is that it can help increase adoption of unified communications (UC) systems. Because it’s so easy to use, with intuitive, plug-and-play connectivity for both PCs and mobile phones, it’s just flat-out simple to connect with UC applications. An additional side benefit is that businesses placing these in their huddle rooms don’t need to worry about post-installation availability. Calisto 7200 comes with a combined USB audio and security cable. However, without the locking cable, the device is portable, so you can take it on the road with you if you wish. To top it all off, there is software support for asset management via our Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering, Plantronics Manager Pro. With the subscription of Plantronics Manager Pro, IT can track these (and other) Plantronics audio and mobile devices to control inventory, update firmware, pre-configure and lock device settings remotely to ensure consistent audio across all devices.

Calisto 7200 connects easily via a USB cable, or you can connect wirelessly via Bluetooth. It has touch-sensitive controls to make it easy to manage calls and the Bluetooth memory can be cleared of previously paired devices which is essential for a shared audio device. And, at a suggested list price of $299.95, it’s affordable enough to install in all of your huddle rooms, small conference rooms and collaboration zones.

This week, we announced our new Plantronics Partner Program, and I’m very pleased to be able to share some details about it with you now. To sum it up briefly, our new channel program is designed to help partners increase growth and profitability, improve customer satisfaction and speed up their return on investment.

The main difference between our new program and the Connect Program we launched in 2007 is that we’ve added new classifications and are making structural changes. A major structural change is the addition of a new track for integrators, alongside resellers. These changes will modify our program from one designed chiefly for hardware resellers who sell headsets as peripherals, to one that provides support and incentives to high-growth partners like integrators and managed service providers.

The new program features access to product training and certification, sales and marketing tools, deal registration, marketing development funds and rewards depending on the partner’s level of engagement with Plantronics. We’re offering three levels with increasing features and benefits: registered, gold and platinum. Our former program was volume and revenue-based. Now, revenue is not the main focus. It’s about what elements a partner brings to the table. It’s about pre- and post-sales support, alliance vendor certifications and certifications with Plantronics, in addition to revenue. The three Plantronics certifications are Unified Communications, Contact Center and Plantronics Manager Pro (our SaaS offering). Of these three, Plantronics Manager Pro is available only to the Integrator Track.

While we’ve been the leader in audio devices for more than 50 years, our strong growth in UCC, the strong alliances we have with UCC vendors and the growth of Plantronics Manager Pro have made us look at how our partners can support the needs of our customers and their variety of communications needs. There’s a certain expertise that’s required to sell Plantronics Manager Pro, so this was the perfect time to re-evaluate our program and invest more with our system integrators, solution providers, managed service providers and our born-in-the-cloud partners.

In the next six to nine months, we will also roll out more marketing resources and more incentives. It will be an evolving process rather than rolling it all out on Day One.

We’ve always been a channel-first company. We believe that by always improving our partner programs and investing more in partners with higher value to our customers will support and speed up our partners’ and our growth. We’ll continue to invest, enable and reward the partners of the future for the success of our products of the future.

In an effort to help our partners diagnose the source of any audio issue in this brave new world, Plantronics is releasing a new version of its Software-as-a-Service offering, Plantronics Manager Pro v3.10, that allows IT departments to identify and troubleshoot Bluetooth link connections between supported Plantronics headsets and USB adapters. The report represents a first for both Plantronics Manager Pro and the industry, and in conjunction with the rest of the Conversation Analysis suite provides a wealth of information on headset usage, adoption and acoustic-related data.

With more people working remotely from public spaces such as coffee shops, train cars or airports, providing IT with tools that can monitor the Bluetooth radio link in these unpredictable environments means a faster time to resolution.

The report uses a Quality Impairment Score that shows, at a glance, which users are suffering from audio degradation. The score accounts for packet errors and other related data, with the higher scores indicating greater levels of degradation. Once identified, the source of this high score can then be investigated to determine possible causes such as the headset exiting the range of the USB adapter, interference from other wireless devices in the area or poor positioning of the USB adapter. To learn more about the new Bluetooth Link Quality report, visit this link.

This post can also be found on LinkedIn.

Microsoft Ignite sparked 23,000 attendees with new ideas about innovation and transformation for the future.  The keynotes highlighted how Microsoft will continue its cloud first, mobile first mission with three interlocking ambitions:

• Making personal computing more personal
• Reinventing the nature of work with improved productivity and processes
• Building the intelligent cloud back-end

Skype for Business threads throughout all of these areas in many new ways.  For Plantronics, Microsoft Ignite was all about Skype for Business and we’re very excited about the customer reception.   Here is a re-cap of my Top 10 list of favorite things about Skype for Business that I tweeted throughout the show:

#1 The new UI! 85% of Lync users like it better too.

#2 @Plantronics reaches Millenials w/ relatable comms. By 2020, they’re the majority.

#3 Boost for video usage! Great for flex workers. Headsets needed for privacy & noise.

#4 A future of comm w 300m+ Skype users from kids to grandmas. @Plantronics bridging consumers & biz.

#5 Support for apps like @Plantronics Aware that changes presence status to IN A CALL when on a mobile.

#6 Skype directory search! All Skype users and by name & geo. @Plantronics

#7 Upcoming support for iOS and Android devices! @Plantronics helps you work anywhere.

#8 The call quality dashboard. Pairs nicely w @Plantronics Manager Pro for managing headsets & audio.

#9 The ability to preload content & co-author during a call (summer).

#10 In place upgrade! Should spur quick migration & faster adoption including @Plantronics

The Skype for Business + Plantronics future looks bright for customers of all sizes and the mutual partners that help transform their businesses.   Plantronics has even sweetened the pot by allowing our products to be acquired on an “as-a-service” basis to add simplicity, flexibility and affordability – a win-win for all.