Welcome

Welcome to your February edition of Dealer Insight. We hope that you enjoyed a well-deserved festive break and that your teams are feeling focused, ready for what is set to be another transformational year. 

2020 saw change at speed and scale, but it also shone a light on the benefits of having a strong UCaaS proposition and the importance of a well-designed business continuity plan.

As we continue through this latest lockdown, we understand how important it is that you continue to be able to support your customers in achieving full functionality, whilst also supporting your own teams in their impromptu office spaces.

Whether it’s a spare room, kitchen or that tidy corner of the living room that isn’t piled high with pizza boxes or home schooling materials, everybody is finding their own way to cope with home working.

Now, more than ever before, the importance of UCaaS cannot be ignored. But what comes next? How can we mould our temporary workspaces into offices of the future and how can we continue to support our teams and customers?

In this month’s Dealer Insight we round up our most popular blogs on how crisis has encouraged us to build a futureproof office narrative, why connectivity is the new currency and how to avoid remote working burnout.

Our remote working hints and tips provide insight into how best to structure the working day during lockdown and our business continuity materials will bolster and strengthen your customers’ current plans. Read on to discover what the future holds for UCaaS and how you can re-energise your teams and your customers in 2021.

We were thrilled to launch our first ever virtual GX event back in October, shortly followed by the first of our new quarterly virtual events, GX Lite. Despite not being able to meet in person, we continue to deliver the best possible content through our virtual platform so that you’re up to date with the latest industry tech and trends. This includes live sessions from our exciting keynote speakers.

If you missed our latest GX events, our GX hub page is filled with great content that you can watch on demand. This includes webinars on the importance of giving Teams a voice and why your customers are demanding a omni-channel contact centre. Visit our GX content hub today to discover all of the available content.

Direct Routing for MS Teams has been really well received and we’ve had some wonderful feedback from our partners. With this in mind, we are happy to bring you more updates to the service which can aid you in bringing more value to your customers.

Have you heard about Three UK’s latest network upgrades? Read on to discover how the provider’s year-long overhaul of its services will mean improvements on speed and quality for your mobile customers.

The launch of the latest release of our Partner Hub, version one, was a huge success. The new look and feel platform was made possible due to your welcome and valuable feedback. Many of you have been utilising the new hub and we hope you have been impressed by the changes you’ve seen. It’s an an ideal platform for us to build upon in the future.

Watch this space for further enhancements and read on to discover how the Partner Hub will assist and empower your day to day relationships with Gamma.

Finally, don’t hesitate to get in touch if you need any assistance with any of the topics we’ve mentioned this month.

Neil Taylor
Head of Direct Partner Sales

The February Update:

What the future holds for UCaaS

UCaaS and the reimagining of work

Is connectivity the new currency?

Look back one year and the world looked more than a little different. Before the phrase ‘social distancing’ became an everyday idiom and before Unified Communication’s biggest universal embracement to date.

In a few short weeks, the adoption of conferencing and collaboration tools reached heights previously predicted to take years as business continuity plans were swiftly put into action. Decisions had to be made quickly. Some had to do in 72 hours what would normally take 12 months.

Rome, it seemed, was built in a day…

As we enter the next phase of the pandemic response, however, the question arises: what’s next for UCaaS?..

While the future of work remains the subject of speculation, the ‘world’s biggest remote working experiment’ seems to have been a success, with all parties generally agreeing that it’s time to ‘think outside the office’.

And as for UCaaS?..

Read our exclusive blog and discover why it’s for life, not just a pandemic.

Read the full blog here

Avoiding the big remote burnout

So, your teams and customers are setup remotely and efficiency appears to be back on track, but did you know that Gen Z and millennials have found it particularly hard to adapt to remote working?

Research has shown that home workers are putting in an extra 28 hours a month on average. Read our blog, ‘Why remote working burnout is one of the biggest threats to your business’ to see how best to avoid the burnout.

 

Building your new office narrative

‘UCaaS is a strategy, not a product’ helped readers to discover how our experts believe the office narrative of the future could play out and why the workplace needs to be completely reinvented, not lost.

Catch up with our blog here.

Re-energise in 2021

Re-energise your teams in 2021

As we continue into 2021, it’s evident that remote working has become embedded in many of our routines.

It’s time to shake things up and look at ways in which we can become more efficient in our current home office environments.

Break into this new year refreshed, re-energised and ready to re-motivate your team and your prospects with our useful remote working tips and resources.

It could also be a good time to discuss firming up your customers’ business continuity plans, plans that have surely been tested by this pandemic.

Aid your customers in building a more robust future by utilising all of the tools available to you and the resources that we share below.

Resources

Get back into the working groove with our tips on how to best structure your day. Our handy infographic breaks down a daily shift, guiding  teams through the best way to break down a typical day when working from home.

Our Creating the Modern Workplace eGuide has all of the information you need to perfect a remote setup.

Make sure that you and your customers are taking full advantage of our solutions while working remotely with our Business Continuity page.

Catch up on our GX events

Catch up on our GX events

We would like to extend a big thank you to everyone that attended GX Summit and Gamma’s first ever GX Lite event last year!

Last year we launched our first ever virtual GX Summit, which was shortly followed by our brand new quarterly event, GX Lite! Attendees experienced unique insights, brand new content and thought-provoking keynotes – with a little help from some exciting speakers.

If you missed out on any of our GX events, our GX Summit content hub is still live and houses lots of interesting content to see you and your customers through this accelerated period of digital transformation.

Discover some of the webinars and sessions available to you now, which include the importance of giving Teams a voice, why not all UCaaS solutions are the same and why your customers are demanding a omni-channel contact centre experience.

We look forward to bringing you even more exciting content in 2021.

Sign up here for access to our GX Summit content hub. If you’re already registered then you can head straight to the content hub.

Catch up here

Direct Routing for Teams

Exciting news for Direct Routing

We’ve seen some excellent uptake from our partners since launching our Microsoft Teams Direct Routing service.

Following a review of your feedback we would like to take this opportunity to remind you of some of the changes we have introduced to support both voice enablement of Teams and the ability for partners to successfully take this transformational service to market.

Updated CLI presentation capabilities

There will be a new in-life option for CLI presentation, which currently Microsoft Teams does not support. This will allow a customer to specify any Gamma number associated to the service – use case being that a customer can present a single business number across all users in a single tenant.

Significantly, and because we can natively terminate an NGN (03/08) these numbers can also be chosen as the presentation number.

SIP Trunk Call Manager for Teams

STCM is an intelligent call routing platform providing customers with direct access to and control over their numbers and routing plans. Users can also gain access to number management information, performance statistics and further advanced statistics reporting.

Data regarding call handling efficiencies, productivity, call patterns and caller behaviour are all as standard with our STCM platform. So, if your customer is looking to find out how long their team is taking to answer calls or even how long their customers are kept on hold, SIP Trunk Call Manager has them covered.

Why use STCM with Teams?

It provides users with a robust business continuity setup to keep a business running should disaster strike. It also enables remote users that are unable to access Teams to still have their numbers put onto the same SIP trunk build, allowing them to be directed accordingly.

Other key features include:

  • Network-level performance statistics with near real-time data.
  • Instant business continuity support with disaster recovery capability – calls can be redirected if there is a failure.
  • Threshold limits can be placed on the number of calls directed to a specific number, protecting capacity and maintaining customer service levels.
  • The option to deflect calls away from Teams to outsourced providers for customer service, payments etc.

Need support with your Direct Routing-related marketing and sales activity? Gamma is on hand to provide you with marketing support, including assistance with campaign materials and sales enablement resources. Find out about the benefits of Direct Routing by contacting your Business Development Manager today.

Three UK update

Three UK update means faster speeds and service

Three UK is making some big updates to its network services in a bid to further improve customer experience.

As the biggest data network in the UK, Three has become the first, cloud-powered core network. The project has seen all of the business’ 4G data traffic migrated to the Cloud Core Network, which holds double the capacity of its existing 4G core network.

The provider began an overhaul of its services in 2019, with a vision to upgrade and improve its 3G and 4G network to enable its users to have an all-round faster experience.

Take a look at some of the most recent and upcoming Three updates below.

Upgrading 3G and 4G

Three’s big project has involved refarming 3G into 4G across the UK, making its data and services much more accessible. While the refarming is still in progress, carrier aggregation is close to completion. The team have been busy adding additional antennas to more of its sites, enabling it to transmit data more easily.

Carrier aggregation should see customers benefit from an improved data feed (with thicker bandwidth being seen across the UK as several 4G spectrum bands are combined into one) and new handsets will experience faster browsing and download speeds.

Super-Voice is here

Three has recently upgraded its 4G sites to VoLTE (4G Super-Voice), so an all-round better voice service is also in store when the service is rolled out next year.

The provider has even established a brand-new support team, setup to review network performance levels, identify issues and fix them quickly.

 

 

 

Your new Partner Hub is here!

Experience all the benefits of our new Partner Hub

We are thrilled with the great levels of interest we’ve seen our partners express after experiencing our new look and feel Partner Hub.

We listened to your feedback and, after careful consideration, we designed a portal more aligned with our partner needs and expectations, which we hope will make your working life smoother and all the more enjoyable.

A lot of you migrated across from the older portal throughout August of last year and will already be well-versed in the extensive benefits of the new system. We have highlighted just some of the benefits and how they will assist you below.

New look and feel

The design of the new dashboard was created with ease of use and a more modern flair in mind, aligning itself to our new brand guidelines and meeting the features you need.

Availability checker

Curious as to whether a service is available in a certain area? The new availability checker will give you the answer in seconds.

Pipeline Management

Log leads directly on to the Hub and review your pipeline of opportunities at a glance using the new dashboard feature.

Support calls

Our new system allows you to not just log but also monitor support calls for your customers. If you find yourself chased on a support call, simply log in to assess the status of the ticket and relay the details. You can also view the Gamma network status page for a real time update.

Dashboard capabilities

Gain quick and easy access to the number of open and closed leads in your account, giving you a better view of your success rates. Register new leads and manage your in-flight opportunities via this sales dashboard. Forecast commissions from the deals currently in your pipeline.

But why keep reading about the benefits when you can experience them first hand? Speak to your Business Development Manager to find out more.

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