Comms Business recently attended Ribbon’s annual Perpesctives event to get the latest on UC adoption trends and also how the platform is developing its proposition around CPaaS and SIP security.
Away from the recap and announcements of where the company is going delegates were also treated to the very latest insights from a new market report, (name), that pulled together data from a survey conducted in April.
Amongst other trends such as the willingness for small businesses to adopt UC solutions being lower than enterprises, one main points taken from the research was the CPaaS solutions have never been more appealing.
There is still a lack of interaction from the customer service side from enterprises according to Ribbon Communications (job title) John (second name), who said that click to chat was the most popular feature but businesses are not “going up the stack” of potential feature such as click to call, escalating to video and sharing screens.
He said: “There was a surprising number who are not doing any of these customer service solution and not surprisingly a lot are at least doing click to chat but they are not going up the stack in terms of customer experience or interaction.
And click to chat is really staffed by a human being. You know how it goes, in a multi channel contact centre, you have Catherine who is the agent sitting there, in a queue for outbound phone calls, she may be taking inbound phone calls, she’s got a chat window open which is her responsibility to respond to, email, what have you.
Of course you have heard that the ribbon experience, even in something as simple as click to chat, has a Watson powered chatbot behind it that can gather information Catherine would need to do her job without having her spend her time on low-value activities like saying “Hi my name is Catherine” we can do that for you.”
The findings were also encouraging for Ribbon which also found that the interest in adopting CPaaS solutions was “in the 90s”
SIP Security
However, one area that was taken seriously was the security of SIP lines.
Findings from the report pointed to confusion when it comes to securing the communications infrastructure and resellers are apparently under the illusion that their providers are responsible for securing the lines sold to them.
(john) continued: When we asked who should be responsible for SIP security, the vast majority of partners said that the UCaaS provider should do it or they should do it and I should pay for it; Only about 30 per cent felt that their company should be responsible for it.”
Interestingly the results were switched when it came to federal departments, with 70% of officials saying the government should be responsible for security.
Nonetheless (john) offered caution as best practice going forward adding that there is no expectation on decision makers to know how to best protect themselves, however the point still stands that this is an issue that needs addressing and may be happening more regularly than first anticipated.
“When banks get hacked, they don’t like to stand up and admit it, they assess the damage and do all of that.
“So just as in the early days of data security breaches there were things going on that we don’t know about, I suspect that the same things are happening in SIP right now.
“Unified communications is a wonderful thing, it can make you much more productive, it can help you run your business better but it needs to be done sensibly and you need to ask your providers what level of security are they providing you against various attacks.
“If someone commits toll fraud by stealing credentials on a cloud-based PBX, who is going to be responsible for those toll charges, those are sensible questions that any business person ought to be asking themselves.”