Phone System & Contact Centers

CornerStone Communications operates as a channel sales agency for the many cloud-based phone providers in the industry. Unlike the ISP space, we will work with the phone provider’s sales and support teams. We also help streamline the technical requirements conversation to save you from unnecessary meetings. We’re not obligated to represent any particular solution, so we’ll act on behalf of our customers as a neutral subject matter expert. We’ll help walk through each vendor’s pros and cons and cut through any marketing or sales shenanigans to get you the truth. Once you decide, we’ll help implement the system, including identifying portable numbers, boots-on-the-ground training and installation of handsets, IVR/auto attendant buildouts, and facilitating conversations with programmers for custom integrations. Post-implementation, we’ll help with any change requests, back up your IT team (everyone needs a vacation), and provide ongoing support for the system.

Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS), or cloud-based phone systems, have taken the role as the go-forward communications platforms in the industry. These systems are spun up in private or public clouds and sold to the consumer on a per-seat basis (i.e., each employee receives a seat). Many providers will cover the basics—call, text, and instant messaging. Cloud-based phone systems don’t typically care about your endpoint, as they are designed to deliver service to you anywhere you can access the internet. These solutions can be delivered to users via a softphone on their computer, a mobile app on their cell phones, or even a handset sitting on their desk (or a combination of all three). They don’t require the traditional voice switches or servers, as their infrastructure resides in the cloud.

Customers will benefit from transitioning from an on-premise system to a cloud-based solution. Any solutions we recommend will have geographically redundant hosts to protect against regional outages, meaning your uptime will typically be in the 99.99% (52 minutes of downtime per year) to 99.999% range (6 minutes of downtime per year). You aren’t responsible for managing software or firmware updates on the voice infrastructure; the cloud-based system automates this. The most visible changes to the users will be improved functionality and accessibility with their phones—your users can check their voicemail or call their “desk” number from anywhere in the world. They’ll be able to easily customize their greetings, office hours, automatic forwarding rules, and more.

The admins can expect significantly simplified system administration. Changes to users or IVRs take seconds and can be made from anywhere. Business application integrations come with many products—tie your call logs into your CRM or power your Teams phone with a more reliable backbone.

We’ll help our customers find the best product for their business and pay close attention to your company’s goals and needs. Certain integrations are more accessible with specific UC vendors, while niche requirements may completely rule out industry leaders. As we learn how your business operates, we’ll get insights from key stakeholders in different departments. Sales or customer service may want to call recording functions or improve call handling, while leadership may be concerned with automated analytics and reporting by divisions or groups. Operations managers may wish to find unique solutions to alert employees on a plant floor of spills or emergencies. IT may just want a whole night’s sleep without worrying about their PBX bursting into flames! We’ll help your organization navigate the options and streamline the vetting process to get you the best solution for your company.

Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS), Customer Experience (CX), or cloud-based contact centers have been designed to improve call handling, analytics, and communication methods for companies in high-call traffic industries. Some contact centers specialize inbound or outbound calls, while others excel at omnichannel communications. AI-automated chatbots and voice recognition solutions are further revolutionizing the industry. A typical company that needs a contact center will look for core functionality that phone systems cannot provide—like incredibly intricate and automated IVRs that route inbound calls to contact center agents based on several factors. Customer success and sales teams will strive for improved customer experiences—we want to know if our customers have been sitting on hold or can’t efficiently reach the people they need to talk to. Happy customers lead to reduced support overhead and improved sales—a contact center is necessary to ensure satisfied customers.

Contact centers require a much deeper dive into a business’s needs, as these solutions function as a prominent tool that is the lifeblood of departments or entire organizations. These solutions can be highly customizable and integrated into many products via API push/pulls and custom scripting. Accurate real-time analytics and monitoring allow supervisors to better coach agents, improve call outcomes, and expedite escalation paths during caustic conversations. By maximizing efficiencies in the contact center and providing better tools and workflows to your supervisors and agents, we can reduce the cost of turnover, automate fundamental interactions, and increase sales.

CornerStone will guide you through the complicated process of identifying the CCaaS vendor that best fits your organization. Like phone systems, we want to work with your stakeholders to deliver the best solution as painlessly as possible.

Artificial Intelligence has been (and will be) a headline for years, and for good reason. Creating a lifelike chatbot and service hub can significantly improve customer success outcomes. Analyzing verbal conversations and inflections in tone in real-time will allow supervisors to support their agents better. Pulling data from every conversation as it happens will further power your ability to deliver the best product or service to your customers.

Ultimately, AI relies on the set of data that you give it. While many of the leading UC and CC solutions have some form of AI product baked into their product, some customers may be unable to commit to a complete migration. Some solutions can bolt onto existing phone systems or contact centers to provide many features you could expect from a cutting-edge phone system. These bolt-on products will tie into your system and gather data that your existing system may be unable to. They’ll also allow for improved functionality and reporting that your current system may not support—meaning you can still capitalize on the AI revolution without undergoing a significant prem-to-cloud migration.

UC, CC, and CX Vendors that we work with:

 8×8, Avaya, Broadvoice, CallMiner, CallTower, Cisco, Content Guru, Dialpad, Five9, Genesys, GoTo, Granite, Infobip, IntelePeer, Intermedia, Intrado, Kore.ai, Level AI, Microsoft Teams, Mitel, Net2Phone, Nextiva, NICE CXOne, Observe.AI, Regal, Replicant, RingCentral, RingSquared, Sangoma, Sharpen, Sinch, sipIQ, Spetrotel, Sprinklr, StartMeeting, Talkdesk, TouchTone, UJET, Vonage Business, Zoom