CENTURYLINK ENGAGE IS DIFFERENT....A CLOUD SOLUTION AND SO MUCH MORE

CenturyLink Engage is a simple cloud solution that offers business calling, collaboration, and call center support, no matter where or when you do business.

• Stay Engaged Anywhere, At Any Time – Your workers and sales force remain effective while traveling, using their tablets and smartphones to serve customers.
• Complete Flexibility – Mix and match calling, collaboration, and call center features power your brand and business. Bring your own internet or use theirs.
• Inclusive, High-Value Plans – Three easy-to-understand packages deliver high value with simple billing.
• Low Risk to Use – We’re so sure you’ll love CenturyLink Engage that they back it with a no-cancellation fee satisfaction program regardless of your agreement type.
• Maximum Reliability – Built over-the-top but optimized for performance and call quality when bought with CenturyLink connectivity.
• Deliver Exceptional Customer Service – Add affordable call center capabilities to your business without the need for on-premises equipment.

Three primary offerings that are available with Engage:

Below you can take a look at what is available in each of the three packages:

To learn more about CenturyLink and take advantage of a comparison of 100s of other business calling, collaboration, and contact center solution vendors ... including FREE network design and sourcing support ... simply ask at FreedomFire Communications.

HOW TO VIDEO CONFERENCE LIKE A PRO

 I’m going to be brutally honest here: The grace period for sloppy video conferencing is over.

At this point, most people have had months to practice their video conferencing skills throughout the pandemic. Yet, I still see a fair amount of cringe-worthy presentations regularly.

The truth is that a video conference is an extension of your brand. Clients and sales prospects will judge you based on how you present yourself on screen. So, you need to prepare just as you would for any face-to-face meeting.

The good news is some simple hacks can make all the difference. Here are some tips that you can use to have professional and impactful video conversations.

Let Your Personality Show

The first step is always to be mindful of your environment. One of the great parts about participating in a video conference from home is that you have total control over your surroundings — even more than your regular office. Therefore, every virtual meeting is like a home game for you. Every aspect of your surroundings can be customized to reflect your tastes and your personality (within reason).

So, spend some time reflecting on the area where you typically video conference. What does it say about you? Is the space working to empower you? If not, you may want to consider making some small environmental changes, like adding a bookshelf in the background, hanging a degree or certification on the wall, or investing in a beautiful piece of art that will spark conversations.

Bonus tip: Use your natural surroundings to your advantage. For example, maybe you have a striking view of the ocean, you overlook a sprawling horse pasture, or you have a fireplace in your home office. Use your environment to your advantage, if possible.

Experiment with Virtual Backgrounds

One way that you can spruce up your presentation and boost your brand is to experiment with virtual backgrounds. In Zoom, this can be accessed by going to settings/ virtual backgrounds. All you have to do is upload a high-resolution image to Zoom, and you can have complete control over the theme of your meeting. You can even create customizable backgrounds, with your company logo, products, or even charts and statistics, and swap them out strategically during meetings.

If you decide to experiment with virtual backgrounds, though, make sure you invest in a green screen or find a blank wall that will work with your camera. Otherwise, your image will look choppy and unprofessional. Green screens are inexpensive and collapsible for easy storage.

Focus on Color and Lighting

Another video conferencing hack is to focus on your lighting and personal presentation. This may take a bit of work, but if you want to look your best, it’s worth the time and effort. The smallest details — like the color of your clothing against your background — or your lighting can make all the difference in how you appear on the screen. Check out this great video on adjusting the lighting for Zoom calls for further insight. I even went as far as buying this light on Amazon.

Be sure to adjust the angle of your camera so that it’s level with your face or a little above. This will create an optimal appearance on screen — and no double chins.

Keep Your Mic on Mute

This one is important: If you’re not speaking, put your mic on mute — especially if you’re sharing a working space with other people. Nothing can ruin a conference like background noise, and attendees will be quick to complain about it.

Keep Your Camera Still

Sometimes, video conferencing from a smartphone is unavoidable. However, if you’re going to use your phone for a video call, it should at least be in a fixed position so that the screen is not moving around constantly. Having a video call with someone on a mobile phone can be very distracting. Generally speaking, video calls should be taken from computers with high-quality cameras.

Rock the Upperware 

Chances are your work attire is somewhere in the back of your closet right now, collecting dust. Yet, while there’s nothing wrong with wearing a t-shirt while working from home, it’s not a great look on camera — especially during a sales call or company meeting.

One of our favorite strategies is to rock the upperwear. In other words, put on a dress shirt and tie, with whatever else you happen to be wearing. Just don’t stand up during the call (or venture out into public).

Practice Your Listening Skills

It can be frustrating sitting in on a video conference where everyone is talking at once. You may feel like it’s hard to get a word in edgewise. Understand, though, that just because you are on camera, it doesn’t mean that you have to talk continuously. Sometimes, it’s better to be silent than to contribute to a noisy conversation. Group calls are an excellent opportunity to speak less, listen more, and take good notes.

The biggest takeaway is to relax and be yourself during a video conference. Keep practicing, follow these tips, and eventually, you will be video conferencing like a rock star.

8×8 AND ARYAKA TOGETHER

 

WHY 8×8 AND ARYAKA?

Many people might be wondering why Aryaka and 8×8 have decided to partner together and why it works.

Two Acknowledged Leaders

• 8×8 Gartner UCaaS MQ Leader for 8 years
• Aryaka Gartner WAN Edge Infrastructure MQ Visionary and Customer Choice Awardee

Better User Experience and Performance

• Customers are increasingly reliant on UCaaS to drive enterprise efficiency and meet customer demands
• Underlaying WAN infrastructure must meet the demands of a flexible and dynamic enterprise while maintaining security and reliability

The combined technologies from two leaders in this space will provide enterprises with a fully optimized and comprehensive, best-in-class solution. This partnership delivers optimized access to 8×8’s regional UCaaS Points of Presence (PoPs) by leveraging the Aryaka backbone, eliminating packet loss, latency, and jitter that can occur with the public internet. It will improve user experience, support modern workstyles, video, and voice in the cloud. In addition, the MyAryaka cloud portal offers a real-time view of traffic management that includes monitoring and reporting on 8×8 performance. Ultimately, the joint offer delivers the flexibility, scalability, security, and ‘hands-off’ operation required by IT staff in a world where the one constant is change.

ARYAKA SMARTSERVICES

Aryaka provides an all-in-one SD-WAN, private backbone, and managed service solution, making procurement easier for customers interested in that model. Their SD-WAN includes WAN optimization to boost application performance, especially over long distances.

Last Mile Services are embedded in their Smartservices platform as well; they help mitigate last-mile internet issues.

8×8 PLATFORM

8×8 is the most reliable, most integrated path to the cloud. When you think of Unified Communications, you may be thinking about the basics of telephony, but with 8×8, it’s so much more. It is the intersection of employees and customer and the intersection of sales and service. It is the way work gets done in today’s world.

8×8 has created one platform, which allows you to mix and match licenses to your needs. This is the real strength of 8×8’s CPaaS and what they have been developing for years. It is a unique end-to-end system which they own and manage; it includes seamless integration to all the communications any organization might need, including voice, chat, video, and contact center. This platform is all in the cloud, so you’re not limited like on-prem systems, and you can roll out this flexible model to employees across the globe, wherever they are.

Together, 8×8 and Aryaka deliver:

• Superior voice, video and web conferencing quality with reduced jitter, latency and packet loss
• Maximize uptime of Virtual Office and Virtual Contact Centre due to guaranteed bandwidth from Aryaka’s service prioritization, traffic shaping, and bandwidth reservation algorithms
• Enterprise-grade access to 8×8’s services, through the Aryaka private network, minimizing service interruption and dropped calls
• Increased and assured QoS for all locations including even for those with poor-quality Internet links

To learn more about 8X8 and Aryaka and take advantage of a comparison of 100s of other UCaaS and WAN edge vendors ... including FREE network design and sourcing support ... simply ask at FreedomFire Communications.

How To Plan & Implement A Successful Remote Work Strategy For Your Employees....A Survival Guide For Business Owners

With every significant event, our reality changes in society. Each event changes the way we work, interact, and do business with each other.

COVID-19 will be one of those events that change our status quo, and we will come out of this a very different society compared to what we were going into this. Businesses and employees will have to fight through the struggles of learning to work from home and have a fully remote workforce. Now, as almost a basic necessity for businesses to survive in our new economy, companies will be looking for guidance as UCaaS becomes the new reality.

Businesses are asking for help to make the transition from Premise Based Phone Systems, and old forms of communications, to new technology that allows people to communicate and collaborate how, when and where they want. Making this digital transformation will help them adapt to the changing environment and prepare them for other coming changes.

Today the coronavirus epidemic continues to prompt new travel restrictions and emergency declarations around the world, with massive lockdowns affecting millions of people. Work at home declarations from the CDC and other government agencies are probably going to become the new normal. Not only could it become temporary law, it's the best way to protect your employees from exposure to the novel virus. So how can you as a business owner prepare to transition your workforce into a work-at-home team that still performs at a high level?

Here at FreedomFire Communications, we are seeing certain technology buying behaviors that are the tech equivalent of loading up on bottled water, batteries, and toilet paper. For traditional businesses who still have an on-premise phone system, email server, or file servers, you're going to need to get to the Cloud if you're going to get work-at-home enabled. Here is a quick list of "ingredients" we've compiled to help step you through this transition. Not to worry, you got this!

Ingredient 1: Usable Broadband / High-Speed Internet

The first thing you need to do as a business owner is survey your employees to see what kind of broadband they are using at home. In order to run business voice and video calls they're going to need plenty of throughput. A good standard that should provide enough horsepower is 50 Mb down, 5 Mb upload speed. If your employees aren't getting those kind of speeds, you may consider offering to subsidize the difference to upgrade them from their current plan to 50 Mb x 5 Mb. There are some cable, best-effort fiber, and 4G internet providers that will allow your executives and other employees to get a business-class service delivered to their residence.

If you'd like to review your options, we have access to our patented GeoQuote tool (shown above) that will tell us, in under 30 seconds, what providers (and prices) are available at your employees' locations.

Ingredient 2: Move Your Phone System to the Cloud

You've known about UCaaS (Unified Communications as a Service) for some time, and now may be the time to finally make that jump. In the past, many on-premise phone system users cited quality issues related to running essential traffic over the internet as a reason to NOT move to the cloud. Those issues have more than been addressed through SD-WAN technology, which fixes packet loss and other factors that degrade voice and video quality.

Here are the key features of UCaaS that will enable your work-at-home employees by leveraging the benefits of unified communications in the cloud:

1.  Video Conferencing - if your team is forced to stay at home, having a high-definition video conferencing bridge will enable you to stay connected as a team, and to stay connected to your best customers. Almost every unified communications as a service provider we offer has video conferencing built in to the monthly price, or you can buy it stand-alone from our newest provider: Zoom. Know that we have a lot of options here, including some familiar names: 8x8, RingCentral, Fuze, Nextiva, GoToMeeting (Jive/LogMeIn), and others.

2.  Mobile App - when you move to UCaaS, every employee will be able to download an app to their iPhone or Android phone. Once installed, the app will become the phone system, allowing them to receive and make phone calls from their work number, to transfer calls to fellow employees, and for a general IVR to route calls to your team's soft phones by department, skills, etc. The BEST part about using a cloud-based phone system is reporting - YOU as the manager can see call volume, call duration, and dozens of other metrics about your team, all at once.

3.  Collaboration - using tools like Glip (RingCentral), Slack, 8x8, Nextiva, or Microsoft Teams, your teams will be able to communicate one-to-one, one-to-many, much like a group text that never goes away. Add employees at a future date and they'll see the entire history of the chat as well as all of the files that have been uploaded to the specific groups. Caution: you're bound to see more animated gif's than you every would have dreamed possible!

4.  CRM Integration - UCaaS was built to integrate with other cloud-based systems, especially CRMs. Many UCaaS providers have already built API's into the most popular CRMs: SalesForce.com, Zoho, ZenDesk, Method CRM, MS Dynamics, Sugar CRM, Hubspot, etc. If you have a homegrown CRM or other internal system you've built specifically to interact with your phone system, we have many providers that can build a custom integration with a new cloud-based phone system for you.

Ingredient 3: Move the Desktop Workspace to the Cloud

One of the reasons many companies require their workforce to come into a centralized office is the specialized software required to do their jobs. Another reason is access control, employers wants to control who has access to what file and inside a physical office, using Active Directory, you can ensure certain file sharing rules within your own Local Area Network.

We have two up-and-coming technologies that address these features and move them all to the cloud, while maintaining centralized control over access permissions.

1. Workspace as a Service - on of our newest suppliers, StratusWorx, offers a platform (shown in the graphic above) that allows you to run ALL of your fully-licenced software programs in the cloud, all while giving you full control over who has remote access. This would allow you to fully virtualize your office while maintaining your current level of production.
2. Desktop as a Service - this service (shown below) allows you to virtualize your employee's individual desktop computers, putting the actual computing in the cloud, and allowing your employees to "see" it through a light-weight app that mimics the PC's workspace.

We can source multiple vendors (shown below) that can help you move to Desktop as a Service, some of them with the capability of turning up seats in a matter of minutes, making it one of the easiest cloud technologies to implement.

Ingredient 4: Remote File Share

When you send your workers home, it's imperative that they be able to share, collaborate on, and store files in the cloud. The most popular cloud file storage providers are:

1. Microsoft Office 365 - OneDrive
2. Google G-Suite - Google Drive
3. Dropbox
4. Box.com

Using file share you'll be able to sync desired folders and files to your local machine, you'll be able to share files with JUST the people you want to see it, and most importantly, your entire enterprise will be immune from data loss caused by failing, damaged, or stolen hardware.

Time Frame: How Fast Can You Make the Pivot?

The good news is, we and our network of Trusted Service Providers can get these new services set up for you quickly. The thing that takes the longest time is the transfer of your current phone numbers, which requires paperwork to get your existing provider to release them to the new one. We typically see this taking around a month to transfer properly. Everything else can be done in weeks and in some cases, days.

Looking on the bright side, once this virus has been contained (and it will), you'll have the most advanced cloud-based technology working for you well into the foreseeable future, making your workforce dynamic, adaptable, and mobile.

If you'd like assistance in putting a work-at-home technology plan in place, simply ask us online at FreedomFire Communications and we'll take it from there. It's as easy as 1, 2, 3.

In the meantime, stay safe, work smart, and know that we are proud to play a small part in helping contain the Coronavirus outbreak and to protect our most vulnerable from this terrible virus through practical work-at-home strategies. Our thoughts and prayers go out to those affected by this outbreak.

If you have a comment, suggestion, or idea, we'd love to hear about it in the comments below!