written by Will Morey.

Introducing CONNECT for iPECS Cloud

I’ll start with what everyone in the channel knows. Cloud services are growing, and they bring more potential for recurring revenue.

So far, so obvious. But here is my question – are you actually realising the opportunities this offers? It is often easier to sell a customer out-of-the-box solutions. This is great, but more and more customers are wising up to what cloud can do and demanding more of their suppliers as a result.

Businesses don’t just do communication over the cloud. They increasingly manage everything over it. What if you could bring together every cloud service within your UCaaS offering? What if you could use that to automate more, making your customers even more efficient?

With CONNECT for iPECS Cloud, we enable our partners to do just that. In short, this means you close more deals, retain more customers, and grow your recurring revenue through delivering more bespoke deployments.

What is CONNECT for iPECS Cloud?

CONNECT is a WebRTC application for iPECS Cloud designed to integrate with anything. It comes with built-in integrations including Google, Microsoft 365, Asana, ClickUp and Clockify. Since it’s built on the foundations of iPECS ONE, it also includes all of the features you would expect from a UC application like calling, video, chat and presence.

How does CONNECT work?

CONNECT uses the iPECS ONE API for its core UC functionality but unlocks the opportunity for almost limitless customisation.

We offer development services for CONNECT to ensure all integrations meet the customers requirement. This is broken down into 3 steps:

  • Discover – We work with our partners and their customers to ensure the requirement is achievable, properly scoped out and priced.
  • Develop – Our development partner will build the integration and QA test.
  • Deploy – We will deploy the integration and closely monitor to ensure it meets the customers requirement.

Integrations that help you win and close deals

The key purpose of CONNECT is to win more opportunities when customers require more than just basic integrations like click-to-dial and screen-popping. CONNECT for iPECS Cloud allows for bespoke integrations into anything that has an API.

The options are endless. Maybe your customer has a custom CRM. Perhaps it’s an existing application that requires more specific or complex integrations than you can easily deliver. As cloud services grow, these are increasingly common obstructions to closing deals. And in my view, the problem will only grow as more customers become more familiar with cloud services.

CONNECT solves the problem, unlocking the potential for bigger deployments and stickier customers!

How has CONNECT for iPECS Cloud been used? 

We have already deployed CONNECT to help partners win in specialist sectors where “out-of-the-box” wouldn’t cut it. Here are three examples:

1.     Legal sector

CONNECT helped win a 200+ user opportunity at a solicitor due to their specific requirements around Microsoft 365 integration which included:

  • UC presence needing to be dynamically updated when in a meeting
  • Chat needed to be removed as they had a policy to use chat in Teams
  • Visibility of colleagues’ meeting titles and the start and end times of meetings within the presence screen
  • Visibility of Outlook calendar directly in CONNECT

2.     Retail sector

CONNECT has been adopted in a major clothing retailer to allow them to make the most of their Google Workspace. This integrates with Google Contacts, Directory and Calendar to give a seamless user experience.

Some of the requirements included:

  • Live search of their Google Contacts
  • Live Google Calendar integration updating presence information in real time
  • Presence needing to be updated when in a meeting
  • Chat needed to be removed as they had a policy to use chat in Google
  • Visibility of colleagues’ meeting titles and start and end times from the presence screen
  • Visibility of Google calendar directly in CONNECT

3.     Marketing agencies

Integration with two major project management systems (Asana and ClickUp), along with time tracking by Clockify, lends itself to an agency environment.

This pulls all tasks from the project management system into the CONNECT for iPECS Cloud interface. This means CONNECT is the only interface that the user needs to access to plan out their day. This can also be used simultaneously alongside Google and Outlook integration.

The time tracking integration allows users to start and stop timers from CONNECT and view the hours they have spent working on specific tasks. This is a great example of how the bespoke nature of CONNECT can benefit businesses in this sector. And of course, we can integrate with other productivity tools too!

Want to know more?

Let’s go back to where we started. CONNECT is about so much more than selling a phone system. It’s about solving a problem, going above expectations and making your services the centre of your customers’ working lives.

Here is the really important point: the need for CONNECT will only become greater. As the market for cloud services continue to grow, businesses will want more services that talk to each other.

That creates a need for more bespoke service, with big rewards for providers who can deliver it. CONNECT for iPECS Cloud is your opportunity to become one of them.

Want to learn more? Get in touch with the team!