Turning numbers into people with smartnumbers

Flexible call handling
on a number-by-number basis

Tim Jalland, Vice President Product Management and Development, Resilient Networks, spotlights how smartnumbers services can make better call management a reality.

What’s setting smartnumbers apart is not its massive potential to help reduce costs — although that’s a huge selling point — it’s our approach that keeps at its heart the simple fact that every phone number represents a person; so smartnumbers makes it possible to configure call handling on a number-by-number basis.

This granularity sets us apart from other suppliers who take a much more sledgehammer approach, only able to direct calls on mass. Our granularity feeds into another of our strengths — putting call management directly into the hands of our customers, giving greater control and flexibility.

My role is to get as close as possible to our customer’s challenges and issues, to understand the trends their grappling with, and then to translate this knowledge into smartnumbers new product development. At the moment, I see several key motivators at work:

• Consolidating services to achieve more agility (and save budget and cash). Data centre consolidation, for example, is a strong driver of rationalisation.
• Organisational or estate rationalisation to both cut costs and to increase workforce flexibility. This then requires increased flexibility in communications.
• The desire for more mobility across all aspects of business, making flexible working and mobility of communications an integrated part of the enterprise environment and no longer an awkward add-on.

This all comes back to the fundamental — phone numbers represent people. And people are on the move more now than ever before. So whether it’s in a recovery or flexible-working context, our customers need to be able to direct incoming calls on a number-by-number basis.

In terms of recent developments within the smartnumbers portfolio, we’re in the process of launching the smartnumbers web-based portal, giving our customers the ability to configure their own services, anytime.

The smartnumbers web-based portal gives the customer enterprise-wide control of call routing

• It gives greater control over the service, with changes being properly authorised and approved using a work flow. Customers can draft changes in a working area, get them approved for the live platform and then, when ready, authorise them and make them live at a convenient time.
• Security is critical and they define different levels of authority on the portal, for example, who can view plans but not make changes, who can make changes but not authorise them, and who can action a network change.
• It makes making a change fast and simple but without losing control or security – faster than going via the helpdesk to make changes.

We are continuing to enhance the services that we deliver to improve the way that our customers communicate with their customers, suppliers and other stakeholders. To find out more I would encourage you to book a demo now by calling 020 3162 3030.