Office in your pocket. We configure cloud PBX on mobile phones
Virtual and cloud PBXs, and indeed the entire VoIP as a whole, have noticeably changed business telephony in just a few years. Many still remember those times when the presence of an “iron” PBX in a small office was considered a sign of success and prosperity. White boxes of “Panasonic” or “Samsung” cost a lot of money, and with their help it was possible to telephone only a few workplaces and, as soon as the free lines or slots ended, it was necessary to re-buy expansion cards, pull wires, connect fixed and system phones.
What we are seeing now: golden times came for SOHO - any micro business can buy a cloud solution with almost unlimited functionality for one or two thousand rubles a month, spend a couple of hours setting up and launch its own telephony, and the next day will look like " per million ”- voice greetings, call forwarding, call transfers, waiting queues. The client who called the ad on the Internet sometimes does not immediately understand where he got: in the head office of an international Internet holding or in a small room of a digital agency with two employees in the staff. Technology does not stand still and now it is possible to organize “telephony for a million” even without an office room: connect mobile phones to the cloud PBX and answer advertising calls while on the run, so to speak, create your own “office in your pocket” .
Our company works in this area - the area of ​​integration of mobile communications and IP-telephony.
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FMC technology appeared on the technological sky for a long time and for a long time was the lot of large companies with a large staff of mobile workers, small business could not find the application of the integration of cellular and fixed phones. Over the past couple of years, FMC technologies have become popular and converged FMC solutions have begun to appear on the market, allowing small business problems to be solved for very reasonable money and in a short time. What is so good about FMC technology for small businesses? First of all, the friendship of mobile phones and the SIP protocol opens up a wide road for all sorts of integrations: connecting a cell phone, like a mobile SIP device, to an IP-PBX means eliminating the need to sit in front of a computer or in a WI coverage area -FI for connection to office PBX.
Modern telecom is designed in such a way that the overwhelming majority of popular IT products are more likely literate marketing wrappers on top of established services than technological innovations. From the very beginning, our company Iptelefon closely followed the FMC trend and developed cases at the junction of mobile and VoIP-technologies.
The solution we want to talk about is an example of how to wrap the existing FMC technology and cloud PBXs into the “correct” wrapper, adding some interesting technical solutions. We proceeded from the fact that mobile phones with an FMC SIM card are not just additional devices in the company's telephone network, but that they are the ONLY devices in the telephone network, i.e. Cloud PBX functionality is only available on mobile phones, fixed IP phones or softphones are optional and may not be used at all. This is how our “Office in your pocket” turned out, an FMC-VoIP platform based on the cloud-based SaaS IP-PBX Hive, of which we are the developer.
A little bit about the fact that the diagram is indicated by a yellow “IP-SIM” icon. IP-SIM is an FMC SIM card, but with some differences from those SIMs that are standardly offered by mobile operators. The “ordinary” FMC-SIMs have two directions of calls: calls to short numbers within the company's dial plan (addressed to the IP-PBX) and calls to all other (fixed, fixed, etc.) numbers that are addressed in the usual way - via cellular network. Those. if the mobile employee dials the customer's city number, such a call will skip past the PBX and go directly to the GSM network, which means there is no possibility to manage such a call, record it or integrate, for example, with CRM. Our IP-SIM work differently: ALL calls from SIM-cards are addressed first to the cloud-based IP-PBX of the client and only then are sent to the telephone network by the route specified in the settings of this very PBX. In other words, the SIM is represented by the SIP platform as a regular SIP device and all the variety of VoIP technologies can be applied to it. Calls go exclusively over the GSM network, no 3G / 4G is used. The sim card has become a full-fledged IP-phone and we can practically invent infinite ways to use it.
We developed the HIVE cloud PBX as a regular cloud VoIP platform with a number of amenities: an advanced voice scenario management module, boxed integration with the most popular CRM, an online employee status monitoring panel and convenient management of internal and external channels. Based on HIVE, we decided to make our “Office in your pocket”. To do this, we wrote a special plugin that integrates a mobile phone from IP-SIM into a PBX as a normal IP phone or softphone. The mobile phone has a short internal number, you can assign a voice menu to it, you can transfer calls from one mobile phone to another, record conversations, watch call statistics in the HIVE panel, manage the sim card from a single interface. Cellular has become a full-fledged office phone, only now this office phone is in your pocket and not tied to the Internet. The HIVE plus IP-SIM functionality can be described as follows:
We suspect that the dry description of the functionality of the “Office in your pocket” does not give a complete understanding of how it all works and what we have done interesting. Consider a specific example. A small company of three people is engaged in repairing household appliances at home and has no office at all. The guys have a website on which the mobile phone number of one of the employees, Timur, who also works as a commercial director and a refrigerator repair specialist, is indicated as an advertising number. Sometimes the calls of potential customers are answered by Timur’s wife, who is sitting at home with a small child. She tells clients that “the master will call back within 5 minutes” and urgently dials her husband, digging in the next INDESIT in the Moscow region, to inform the good news “There is an order!”. The guys buy a subscription “Office in the pocket” and rebuild all the telephony in a new way.
The first thing they do is change the number on the site. Now, instead of a mobile phone number, there is a beautiful city number This immediately increases the confidence of potential customers, since it is no longer obvious that there is a micro-business behind a beautiful website. Then, in the cloudy HIVE, a voice greeting is configured (that is “Hello, you called ..., press ...”) and a call-out strategy is indicated - “To connect with the Refrigeration and Freezing Equipment Repair Department, click“ one ”(Timur's mobile phone rings), to connect with the Department for the maintenance of computer equipment, click “two” (Oleg's cellphone is ringing) or stay on the line, you will be answered by the first free operator (Timur’s wife’s cell phone is ringing) ”.
Calls are distributed according to the desired scenario and immediately get on the desired cellular. Timur, Oleg and Sergey are driving around on orders at this time, without fear that the client will call at the wrong time (when there is no signal from the cellular network or when it is inconvenient to talk) - you can configure the script so that the call will leave the best route, i.e. where the call can be answered best. After hours or on holidays, you can activate IVR - “We are happy for calls during business hours from 9-00 to 18-00 ...” or turn on the voice box with a notification about missed emails.
When calling clients from mobile guys, not cellular numbers will be determined, but the advertising number on the site, to which you can always call back and hear a beautiful IVR. Micro-business in the eyes of customers begins to look much more serious. If we integrate “Office in an envelope” and CRM, then Timur, as a commercial director, has the opportunity to study the entire history of appeals in the evenings, after work, set tasks for Sergey and Oleg, tag regular customers, see the effectiveness of advertisements (in advertisements you can specify different contact numbers), do advertising email-mailing.
A huge plus also lies in the fact that all expenses on mobiles are visible in the statistics and the question no longer arises - who spent how much on calls and how to pay for communication from the general pocket. The “Office in your pocket” has another advantage: you can do without the PBX control interface at all. It’s enough just to set everything up and save in the cloud, mobile phones work further. You do not need to log in each time and twist something, the intelligent robot will switch everything by itself. Notifications of missed calls, recordings of conversations (if the recording is enabled), daily or weekly stats will be sent to email and all information can be viewed directly on the smartphone.
When developing our products, our productologists have foreseen that Sergey, Timur and Oleg may not want to master all the subtleties of IP-telephony and will simply tell by phone what they need. In this case, the technical support, based on the concessionaires' “wishes,” takes everything up by itself and is ready to create the necessary scenarios just by calling. We do not see a big threat to the technical service in this — a correctly-tuned robot scenario with an understanding of the matter, practically does not require attention and has been working for years without changes. It turns out a kind of virtual PBX without having to press the buttons in the admin panel. Timur, Oleg and Sergey are pleased and are thinking that it would be nice to expand the list of services and connect a familiar specialist in installing shower cabins to the business.
Describing the solution and not showing the “virtualka” interface would not be very correct. The interface may be required by those who have the time and desire to customize everything on their own. HIVE has some decent functionality and, if you wish, you can customize a lot of “goodies”.
Online monitoring. In this panel, you can see the company's pulse, you can see the active subscribers, the number of current connections, unanswered calls and much more.
Panel add new employee. You can assign several short numbers for one account, register profiles in social networks, contact numbers or user rights in the system. Immediately, the appointment of IP-SIM as internal phones.
Settings panel for incoming numbers. Here you can add the necessary virtual numbers and assign them to the previously created call strategies.
IVR panel and incoming scripts. HIVE has an advanced graphical script editor. The simplest single-level IVR is created with two clicks, but if you wish, you can create a whole tree with the transfer of control under a variety of conditions, if it is suddenly needed by someone.
Call statistics. Here you can get all the necessary information for a specified period of time, filter calls by employee or incoming number, listen to the recording of conversations in the built-in player, see what route or what number the necessary call came to.
Integration of mobile communications, cloud PBX and CRM-systems is a new approach that allows a thinking developer or vendor to create a whole line of niche phone products. Our “Office in your pocket” is just one example of such a product. We understand very well that the SaaS market has become very competitive and the struggle for a client in a common “clearing” where leaders have firmly settled is a very difficult task. Creating niche solutions, developing various integrations, introducing specialized cases, you can grope conditionally free niche in both technological and marketing planes. This is good for the end user: a segmented market is a sign of the maturity of the industry. We will work and invent further.
What we are seeing now: golden times came for SOHO - any micro business can buy a cloud solution with almost unlimited functionality for one or two thousand rubles a month, spend a couple of hours setting up and launch its own telephony, and the next day will look like " per million ”- voice greetings, call forwarding, call transfers, waiting queues. The client who called the ad on the Internet sometimes does not immediately understand where he got: in the head office of an international Internet holding or in a small room of a digital agency with two employees in the staff. Technology does not stand still and now it is possible to organize “telephony for a million” even without an office room: connect mobile phones to the cloud PBX and answer advertising calls while on the run, so to speak, create your own “office in your pocket” .
Our company works in this area - the area of ​​integration of mobile communications and IP-telephony.
')
FMC technology appeared on the technological sky for a long time and for a long time was the lot of large companies with a large staff of mobile workers, small business could not find the application of the integration of cellular and fixed phones. Over the past couple of years, FMC technologies have become popular and converged FMC solutions have begun to appear on the market, allowing small business problems to be solved for very reasonable money and in a short time. What is so good about FMC technology for small businesses? First of all, the friendship of mobile phones and the SIP protocol opens up a wide road for all sorts of integrations: connecting a cell phone, like a mobile SIP device, to an IP-PBX means eliminating the need to sit in front of a computer or in a WI coverage area -FI for connection to office PBX.
Modern telecom is designed in such a way that the overwhelming majority of popular IT products are more likely literate marketing wrappers on top of established services than technological innovations. From the very beginning, our company Iptelefon closely followed the FMC trend and developed cases at the junction of mobile and VoIP-technologies.
Idea
The solution we want to talk about is an example of how to wrap the existing FMC technology and cloud PBXs into the “correct” wrapper, adding some interesting technical solutions. We proceeded from the fact that mobile phones with an FMC SIM card are not just additional devices in the company's telephone network, but that they are the ONLY devices in the telephone network, i.e. Cloud PBX functionality is only available on mobile phones, fixed IP phones or softphones are optional and may not be used at all. This is how our “Office in your pocket” turned out, an FMC-VoIP platform based on the cloud-based SaaS IP-PBX Hive, of which we are the developer.
A little bit about the fact that the diagram is indicated by a yellow “IP-SIM” icon. IP-SIM is an FMC SIM card, but with some differences from those SIMs that are standardly offered by mobile operators. The “ordinary” FMC-SIMs have two directions of calls: calls to short numbers within the company's dial plan (addressed to the IP-PBX) and calls to all other (fixed, fixed, etc.) numbers that are addressed in the usual way - via cellular network. Those. if the mobile employee dials the customer's city number, such a call will skip past the PBX and go directly to the GSM network, which means there is no possibility to manage such a call, record it or integrate, for example, with CRM. Our IP-SIM work differently: ALL calls from SIM-cards are addressed first to the cloud-based IP-PBX of the client and only then are sent to the telephone network by the route specified in the settings of this very PBX. In other words, the SIM is represented by the SIP platform as a regular SIP device and all the variety of VoIP technologies can be applied to it. Calls go exclusively over the GSM network, no 3G / 4G is used. The sim card has become a full-fledged IP-phone and we can practically invent infinite ways to use it.
Functional
We developed the HIVE cloud PBX as a regular cloud VoIP platform with a number of amenities: an advanced voice scenario management module, boxed integration with the most popular CRM, an online employee status monitoring panel and convenient management of internal and external channels. Based on HIVE, we decided to make our “Office in your pocket”. To do this, we wrote a special plugin that integrates a mobile phone from IP-SIM into a PBX as a normal IP phone or softphone. The mobile phone has a short internal number, you can assign a voice menu to it, you can transfer calls from one mobile phone to another, record conversations, watch call statistics in the HIVE panel, manage the sim card from a single interface. Cellular has become a full-fledged office phone, only now this office phone is in your pocket and not tied to the Internet. The HIVE plus IP-SIM functionality can be described as follows:
- The virtual number is 8-800 or 495/499. This is a common telephone service that allows you to organize incoming calls to multichannel numbers. You can connect any number of numbers and distribute incoming calls between them at your own discretion, for example, create a free hotline for the whole RF or simply indicate the number on the landing page as advertising. Numbers can be connected or disconnected at any time at the request of the client. Nothing special.
- Functional IP PBX. The square number 2 means that the number is configured on the cloud PBX and is controlled there. You can limit the number of lines, set the desired route for incoming and outgoing calls, deny or allow to call in different directions, assign a caller ID.
- IVR - voice greeting and processing scripts. Here, too, everything is simple: “Hello, you called ……. Press“ one ”to connect with… ..”. You can assign an incoming call to an employee or a department, create call strategies: all at once, in turn, cascade.
- Call statistics. All calls are in the statistics, you can see the duration of calls, the direction of calls, who and where and to whom called. Conversations are recorded and saved in the statistics panel. The built-in player allows you to listen to the conversation without leaving the HIVE interface. You can send a report on calls or write to MP3 by email if the interface is not used.
- IP-SIM. Here it is already interesting. All that HIVE cloud can do is work on mobile - all voice menus, rules for handling incoming calls, a single company number for outgoing calls, call recording and statistics. Employees use only mobile and are out of the office. PBX lives in the cloud and the corporate cellular network is also managed from the cloud. We change the incoming script and mobile phones of employees begin to work under the new rule, just as it happens with landlines in ordinary PBXs.
- Call Forwarding and Call Transfer. Any call received on IP-SIM via PBX (first the call came to a single advertising number, then by pressing the “one” button got on the mobile employee) can be transferred from one mobile phone to another, redirected to the third or connected to the conference, again , only with the participation of corporate mobile.
- Integration with CRM. HIVE provides box-based integration with amoCRM and Bitrix24, which allows you to combine corporate mobile communications and accounting of calls and contacts in transaction cards into a single whole. This is convenient when a mobile employee returns “from the fields” to his home or office and wants to organize and save all his telephone activity for the day in the form of structured data and assigned tasks.
Case example
We suspect that the dry description of the functionality of the “Office in your pocket” does not give a complete understanding of how it all works and what we have done interesting. Consider a specific example. A small company of three people is engaged in repairing household appliances at home and has no office at all. The guys have a website on which the mobile phone number of one of the employees, Timur, who also works as a commercial director and a refrigerator repair specialist, is indicated as an advertising number. Sometimes the calls of potential customers are answered by Timur’s wife, who is sitting at home with a small child. She tells clients that “the master will call back within 5 minutes” and urgently dials her husband, digging in the next INDESIT in the Moscow region, to inform the good news “There is an order!”. The guys buy a subscription “Office in the pocket” and rebuild all the telephony in a new way.
The first thing they do is change the number on the site. Now, instead of a mobile phone number, there is a beautiful city number This immediately increases the confidence of potential customers, since it is no longer obvious that there is a micro-business behind a beautiful website. Then, in the cloudy HIVE, a voice greeting is configured (that is “Hello, you called ..., press ...”) and a call-out strategy is indicated - “To connect with the Refrigeration and Freezing Equipment Repair Department, click“ one ”(Timur's mobile phone rings), to connect with the Department for the maintenance of computer equipment, click “two” (Oleg's cellphone is ringing) or stay on the line, you will be answered by the first free operator (Timur’s wife’s cell phone is ringing) ”.
Calls are distributed according to the desired scenario and immediately get on the desired cellular. Timur, Oleg and Sergey are driving around on orders at this time, without fear that the client will call at the wrong time (when there is no signal from the cellular network or when it is inconvenient to talk) - you can configure the script so that the call will leave the best route, i.e. where the call can be answered best. After hours or on holidays, you can activate IVR - “We are happy for calls during business hours from 9-00 to 18-00 ...” or turn on the voice box with a notification about missed emails.
When calling clients from mobile guys, not cellular numbers will be determined, but the advertising number on the site, to which you can always call back and hear a beautiful IVR. Micro-business in the eyes of customers begins to look much more serious. If we integrate “Office in an envelope” and CRM, then Timur, as a commercial director, has the opportunity to study the entire history of appeals in the evenings, after work, set tasks for Sergey and Oleg, tag regular customers, see the effectiveness of advertisements (in advertisements you can specify different contact numbers), do advertising email-mailing.
A huge plus also lies in the fact that all expenses on mobiles are visible in the statistics and the question no longer arises - who spent how much on calls and how to pay for communication from the general pocket. The “Office in your pocket” has another advantage: you can do without the PBX control interface at all. It’s enough just to set everything up and save in the cloud, mobile phones work further. You do not need to log in each time and twist something, the intelligent robot will switch everything by itself. Notifications of missed calls, recordings of conversations (if the recording is enabled), daily or weekly stats will be sent to email and all information can be viewed directly on the smartphone.
When developing our products, our productologists have foreseen that Sergey, Timur and Oleg may not want to master all the subtleties of IP-telephony and will simply tell by phone what they need. In this case, the technical support, based on the concessionaires' “wishes,” takes everything up by itself and is ready to create the necessary scenarios just by calling. We do not see a big threat to the technical service in this — a correctly-tuned robot scenario with an understanding of the matter, practically does not require attention and has been working for years without changes. It turns out a kind of virtual PBX without having to press the buttons in the admin panel. Timur, Oleg and Sergey are pleased and are thinking that it would be nice to expand the list of services and connect a familiar specialist in installing shower cabins to the business.
Interface
Describing the solution and not showing the “virtualka” interface would not be very correct. The interface may be required by those who have the time and desire to customize everything on their own. HIVE has some decent functionality and, if you wish, you can customize a lot of “goodies”.
Online monitoring. In this panel, you can see the company's pulse, you can see the active subscribers, the number of current connections, unanswered calls and much more.
Panel add new employee. You can assign several short numbers for one account, register profiles in social networks, contact numbers or user rights in the system. Immediately, the appointment of IP-SIM as internal phones.
Settings panel for incoming numbers. Here you can add the necessary virtual numbers and assign them to the previously created call strategies.
IVR panel and incoming scripts. HIVE has an advanced graphical script editor. The simplest single-level IVR is created with two clicks, but if you wish, you can create a whole tree with the transfer of control under a variety of conditions, if it is suddenly needed by someone.
Call statistics. Here you can get all the necessary information for a specified period of time, filter calls by employee or incoming number, listen to the recording of conversations in the built-in player, see what route or what number the necessary call came to.
Integration of mobile communications, cloud PBX and CRM-systems is a new approach that allows a thinking developer or vendor to create a whole line of niche phone products. Our “Office in your pocket” is just one example of such a product. We understand very well that the SaaS market has become very competitive and the struggle for a client in a common “clearing” where leaders have firmly settled is a very difficult task. Creating niche solutions, developing various integrations, introducing specialized cases, you can grope conditionally free niche in both technological and marketing planes. This is good for the end user: a segmented market is a sign of the maturity of the industry. We will work and invent further.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/270871/
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