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Last April, I shared Mitel’s vision for CloudLink to enable the next generation of communications innovation for Mitel customers. Since its debut in 2019, CloudLink has emerged to quickly deploy innovations across Mitel’s communication platforms, providing customers with faster access to new features and applications.
By making Mitel APIs available to our customers and partners, the Mitel Developer Program is fast becoming a universal application development and deployment engine that’s empowering Mitel customers to compete more effectively in this digital world.
Mitel MiVoice Office 400 and MiVoice 5000 customers were the first to obtain the CloudLink gateways that provided access to the Mitel APIs earlier this year. Mitel is now excited to announce the availability of CloudLink gateways for the 85,000+ customers in more than 100 countries that rely on our MiVoice Business and MiVoice MX-ONE platforms.
Laying the Foundation for Powerful Communications-enabled Innovations
These new CloudLink gateways will allow MiVoice Business and MX-ONE customers to develop custom applications using Mitel APIs to integrate with their Mitel communications platform. Custom applications that address specific vertical use cases can digitally transform processes, improve customer service, and even enable new lines of business.
These are exciting times for Mitel MiVoice Business and MX-ONE customers and the global network of Mitel channel and technology partners that support them. Their imagination is the only limit to the innovations these custom applications can enable.
To jumpstart that collective imagination, I’ll focus on examples of two categories of use cases that demonstrate the art of the possible: those that improve customer service and those that enhance the employee experience and productivity.
Communication-enabled Business Processes Elevate Service Quality
MiVoice Business and MiVoice MX-ONE customers are often mid-size to large businesses and government agencies that rely on a wide range of enterprise and custom apps. These organizations are also grappling with disruptive challenges, such as increasing customer expectations, the advent of hybrid work programs, and the pressure to transform processes to keep pace with the competition digitally.
Custom applications built on the Mitel Developer Portal can help solve these challenges. By seamlessly integrating communications capabilities like voice, messaging, chat, and video with automated, application-driven workflows, enterprises can dramatically improve customer and constituent service quality, support employee collaboration, and lower costs. Here are just a few examples:
Never send a customer call to voicemail: When customers need attention, they want to speak to someone, not leave a voicemail message that may take days to return. An application that enables intelligent call routing based on employees’ calendar presence allows any employee to forward calls to an appropriate backup resource whenever their calendar shows them as unavailable. So, if the employee has an appointment, is traveling, or is on vacation, customers are always routed to someone who can provide a timely answer.
Give customers a white glove shopping experience: Whether it’s groceries, clothing, a new computer, or their beverage of choice, consumers want to buy online but may still need to “talk” to a store employee or product expert before making the purchase. A custom app can integrate Mitel chat or voice with a modern ‘park and page’ application so that retail employees can automatically notify when an online customer is waiting for help. Store employees can immediately respond to the request to make sure the customer doesn’t leave the store without making a purchase.Keep extended sales teams informed: The more productive your sales teams, the better your bottom line. But changes in deal status can shift priorities on an ongoing basis. Mitel APIs let you integrate Mitel communications apps like MiCollab messaging or video with your CRM platform. So, your extended team is notified in real-time if a deal closes or is delayed.
Leverage constituent eyes and ears: Local governments struggle to monitor neighborhood safety and infrastructure quality across their vast footprints. Potholes, broken tree limbs, and sidewalk separations can occur anywhere, any time—putting constituents at risk. Many towns and cities have created applications to provide members with timely information. When these custom apps are communications-enabled with Mitel applications, real-time intelligence can flow both ways. For instance, if a constituent spots a pothole, he can take a photo on his smartphone that is automatically tagged with the GPS location and report it to the city via a messaging service like WhatsApp. Using Mitel APIs, a notification in the form of a MiCollab chat message or an email to the agency’s contact center automatically creates a problem ticket. It can even alert field service personnel of the issue with a photo, location, and time stamp, so they know exactly where to send their repair team and what tools to bring.
Automating Responses to IoT Sensors
The number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices worldwide is forecast to triple from 9.7 billion in 2020 to more than 29 billion in 2030. This tremendous growth provides governments, manufacturers, and virtually every type of business with opportunities to transform operations for greater efficiency.
IoT devices provide real-time status intelligence. Organizations can use Mitel APIs to communications-enable business processes, which convert that data into an early notification system that triggers the right action. Here are some examples:
Real-time alerts with proactive recommendations: Government agencies, educational institutions, hotels, and other businesses must ensure the safety of constituents, students, consumers, and employees across large areas. IoT devices detect the earliest indications of rising flood waters, gas leaks, fires, or other hazardous conditions. These organizations can use Mitel APIs to integrate with environmental monitoring applications to instantly notify constituents and consumers of a problem and recommend a response. For instance, in the event of rising flood waters, the sensor could send a message to a city’s Mitel API-enabled flood monitoring application and automatically notify people in the region via a phone call or SMS message that they should prepare to evacuate and even recommend an evacuation route.
Managing the availability and costs of healthcare supplies: Many hospitals operate on razor-thin margins, so even slight increases in expenses can dramatically affect operating margins. Hospitals must maintain adequate quantities of a wide range of supplies to serve their patients. Everything from the masks and gloves worn by staff to medical devices used in patient care comes from an extensive network of global suppliers. To ensure they maintain adequate but not too much inventory, IoT devices can monitor when supply levels require replenishing, then use Mitel APIs to automatically send a MiCollab Chat message to the procurement team to initiate a reorder to the appropriate vendor.
Adding service as a new line of business.
Many manufacturers want to grow revenues and maintain customer satisfaction by adding service as a line of business. For example, a water heater manufacturer can install an IoT device at the base that’s designed to detect a water leak. When the sensor detects water, it can send a message to a field service application to automatically generate a ticket identifying the location. It can then send a message to the customer, notifying them of the problem and suggesting a time for the service call.The Call to Mitel Partners: Ready! Set! Innovate
A range of Mitel partners has also been awaiting the availability of MiVoice Business and MX-ONE CloudLink gateways. Mitel has global networks of regional and technology partners with extensive Mitel experience and deep development and vertical expertise. They have ideas about potential new value-added applications that enterprise customers need and the skillset to deliver using Mitel APIs published on the Developer Portal.
These two gateways open a tremendous market opportunity for these partners in more than 100 countries worldwide for more than 85,000 organizations. Watch for future announcements about the value they deliver to Mitel customers.
What Communications-enabled Applications Will Help Your Organization?
If you are a MiVoice Business or a MiVoice MX-ONE customer, congratulations! The availability of CloudLink gateways significantly boosts your ROI by being a powerful source of process innovation.
So, what are the next steps you should take? If you want to use the Mitel Developer Program to develop new features and applications or wish to communications-enabled your applications, visit the Mitel Developer Portal to learn how to get started, obtain help via our community forum, see the API specifications, and access tutorials, sample code, and much more.
We are looking forward to hearing the stories of your upcoming innovations!
