ZOOM

Hot Contact Center Issues… Are they keeping you up at night? Let’s talk.

Aug 31st, 2011
by Moses Velasco.
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I have been reading a lot about the most common issues that contact centers face. Id like to ask you, our readers, partners and customers how YOU handle these commonly recurring issues.

We know contact centers face many challenges. We believe these are the core.  Do you agree that the issues shown below really are the most important?  Help me to improve this list. Let me know if you feel there are additional challenges or more pressing ones than these listed.

From my reading, agent attrition is one of the most challenging issues to overcome. Many companies address this through various incentives, training programs and an active corporate culture. Is agent attrition really an issue or are contact centers able to cope with a healthy churn? Can they absorb the recurring costs of recruitment and training? What can they do to minimize recruitment and training costs? How does this affect contact center quality? What do they do to lengthen the agent life cycle and achieve effective retention?

Customer satisfaction and Customer experience is at the top of the list for some, and maybe a step behind call handling costs for others.  Is there a cultural divide between East and West on which is considered to be the most important? While the West strives for the highest level of customer service, focusing their KPIs on net promoter and CSAT scores, the East seems to be focused on reducing costs and increasing operational efficiency. I Imagine all of you would agree there has to be a fine balance between the two.  Help us to understand which of these is of a higher priority for you and your organization. Don’t forget to let us know where you are based so that we can test how real this cultural divide really is.

Managing Risk and Compliance is a combination of training, script adherence, call recording and most importantly quality monitoring.  What technologies do you rely on to protect you?  Do you find that there is a tough balance between maintaining compliance and maintaining performance? Are you recording 100% of your calls and pushing your QM team to monitor for any infringements? Are you doing anything innovative or cutting edge? We’d like to hear about it!

Many books have been written about leadership and performance. Let’s narrow the discussion down to Performance versus Motivation.  This is also a key component to employee attrition.  How do you motivate your staff to produce a better performance?  How does this affect how long they stay with you?

ZOOM is very much interested in hearing your thoughts on these topics.  Add your thoughts and comments below and let’s talk…

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ZOOM at UX Camp

May 31st, 2011
by Václav Slováček.
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This year ZOOM attended UX Camp in the Czech Republic. UX means User Experience, the art of making applications easy for real people to use. Naturally, we take UX in ZOOM very seriously when considering new features, so we saw the event as a great opportunity to get a new inspiration for the future design of our software. We also wanted to learn about what methods others use that would help us do create user friendlier software easier and faster.

I had the pleasure to speak at the event about how we are introducing user experience into our company. I talked about things that went well but also about things that did not go so well. I was able to mention just a fraction of my experience in ZOOM but I believe it helps others when developing their applications.

If you did not attend the event you missed a lot. You can find some of the presentations on Twitter #uxcampcz. You can view our slides on SlideShare. Remember, however, that slides are nowhere near the experience of watching speakers on stage.

Enjoy!

UX in ZOOM on SlideShare.net

View more presentations from ZOOM at SlideShare.net.







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ZOOM Wrapping up 2010

Feb 24th, 2011
by David Ruzius.
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Wrapping up 2010 has taken us a bit more time than expected as we did not allow ourselves to take a breath to be able to launch the 4.8 version of the ZOOM QM Suite in the first month of this new year.

Finally taking some time to look back at 2010, we are proud to say that it has been a very solid year for ZOOM.

Here are a few highlights and successes we’d like to share:

  • ZOOM experienced an overall 70% annual growth between 2009 and 2010 and almost 100% in the U.S. alone
  • We’ve added 164 new customers bringing the total number to 428 customers in 46 countries worldwide ! As of today the counter is at 452 ;)
  • We’ve signed the OEM agreement with Genesys in January 2010 and ZOOM QM Suite is now on Genesys pricelist as Genesys Quality Management and a number of successful projects have been completed.

For 2011, we want to continue the growth and expand our sales in new territories. We plan to launch some exciting new products and features this year such as our new generation of SpeechREC, Cisco MediaSense Support and are busy redesigning our Call Recording and Quality Management products.

We have a lot to do, so let’s get back to work now.

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Cisco Partner Velocity Barcelona December 2010

Dec 21st, 2010
by David Ruzius.
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velocityZOOM Marketing has attended Cisco Partner Velocity in December in Barcelona.

Cisco Partner Velocity is a great initiative by Cisco to help Cisco partners accelerate their (and Cisco’s) business by discussing and sharing the latest and best marketing techniques (focused on B2B and technology) and by enabling sharing of best practices between partners.

Cisco calls it: “… an opportunity to gain a better understanding of how to drive demand in today’s challenging economy, and how to innovate in a constantly-evolving arena. We’ll help you get comfortable with new technologies and tools, and you’ll come away with relevant marketing resources to build into your marketing plans the moment you return from the conference.”

A number of great speakers presented on topics like “doing more with less, thinking out of the box, integrating social media to become a thought leader in your field, the flipped funnel; how to get more business out of existing customers, (paid) search strategies, lead nurturing, social CRM; capitalizing on relations and how to develop personally and as a business by reaching beyond your capabilities”

A packed 2.5 day program…

cisco-logoVelocity started off with a meeting of Cisco Global Marketing Counsel in which ZOOM International has a seat. The marketing counsel discusses new developments / programs in Cisco, the availability- of and feedback on Cisco provided marketing materials and shared marketing activities. ZOOM provides valuable feedback as not all Cisco provided collateral is suitable for Cisco Development partners.

idol2The event closed with an Emerging Markets ‘Marketing Idol’ competition where 7 (or 8?) teams had to write and present a marketing plan in half an hour for the Cisco’s UMI product. ZOOM’s David Ruzius joint a team with partners from Russia, Africa, Czech Republic and a few other countries. The team decided to put what they had learned over two days in practice and go for a hyper-targeted, personal approach and to mainly let the product speak for itself by bringing it under the attention (and in the hands) of a as many people as possible.

David Ruzius and Vera Boltova presented the plan together and managed to collect the highest score from the Cisco Jury ! We are now all Cisco Marketing Idols ! More pictures on Facebook

This has been a very successful and valuable event and ZOOM is considering to use a similar approach to accelerate it’s own partners.

Read more about Cisco Partner Velocity on Forrester

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ZOOM announces support for Cisco MediaSense

Dec 16th, 2010
by David Ruzius.
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cisco-logoCisco has recently announced Cisco Mediasense, an open-standards, network-based, scalable platform that provides a foundation for recording, playback, live streaming, and storage of media.

As a member of the Cisco Developer Network, ZOOM closely follows any new Cisco developments. Actually ZOOM has been working with the MediaSense product management team over the past 2 years and contributing to the specification. Currently, ZOOM is working on a flexible and open Quality Management Solution that will include interaction recording and quality monitoring that will leverage the Cisco MediaSense platform.

What will you get with a joint Cisco — ZOOM solution?

The Cisco MediaSense Platform provides an open interface using the Cisco Open Recording Architecture (ORA) and provides an open API for solution developers like ZOOM International to provide value-added functionality leveraging the Cisco foundation platform.

Cisco MediaSense is providing:

  • Call recording of G.711 and G.729 on CUCM 8.5 with 3rd generation phones
  • A rich API to query and playback calls with pause and resume features
  • Linux based UCOS Appliance
  • Runs on approved UCS hardware and scales to 450 concurrent users (this limit will soon be liftet)
mediasense

ZOOM — MediaSense Integration

ZOOM International will provide an easy to use unified interface for the customer to utilize powerful media life cycle management, a PCI-DSS compliance feature set as well as quality management to leverage recorded interactions.

ZOOM QM Suite features enhancing Cisco MediaSense:

  • Rich UI that accommodates search, display and plays calls based on attached data from UCCX, UCCE and CRM data is attached during the transfer of the calls from MediaSense to the ZOOM QM Replay Server
  • Multiple MediaSense clusters can be supported through one interface via synchronization with the ZOOM QM Replay Server
  • PCI-DSS compliant encryption support with key management, password strength and lifecycle management
  • Granular users and roles with complete audit log of user actions supporting LDAP & Active Directory
  • Rich media lifecycle management based on attached data to backup, restore, delete or move files to SAN/NAS

By integrating the Cisco MediaSense Platform with the ZOOM Quality Management Suite, customers can ensure their unified communications are captured efficiently and are accessible and manageable using ZOOM’s easy to use and rich UI.

Read more about Cisco MediaSense in the ZOOM MediaSense Support Paper or in the Cisco MediaSense Datasheet.

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ZOOM & Sipera Partnership and Case Study

Dec 14th, 2010
by David Ruzius.
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ZOOM and Sipera have teamed to create a flexible and secure call recording solution for a U.S. Children’s Hospital.

all-childrens-architecture

Reference Architecture Sipera - ZOOM

A specialty licensed Children’s Hospital based in Florida, with multiple outreach centers and facilities located throughout the state required a solution that would provide secure communications for both on campus and remote home users. This included call recording requirements for Operator Services, Internal Helpdesk and the Nurse Triage unit with the additional feature of using extension mobility to provide the same extension both on campus and as a secure remote home user.

Thanks to a partnership and close collaboration with Sipera Systems, ZOOM and Sipera together delivered a solution with the flexibility of “Borderless UC,” extending their Unified Communications applications to any location while maintaining the mission-critical compliance and security posture that is needed to protect these communications.

sipera-logoSipera Systems, the leader in real-time Unified Communications (UC) security, is the choice of enterprises and service providers around the world to support their mission critical UC deployments. Sipera offers groundbreaking, production proven solutions that secure voice, video, messaging, collaboration and real-time communications in converged IP networks, boosting compliance with information security requirements

Brian Shore – President, North America : “Recording encrypted calls has been an industry dilemma for some time. To eliminate this challenge, ZOOM is very proud to partner with Sipera to provide a tested reference architecture for secure and flexible call recording. Sipera’s depth of knowledge in the security arena matched with ZOOM’s IP telephony expertise is a powerful combination.”

Read the ZOOM – Sipera Case Study on this Childrens Hospital.

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Cisco Expo Season

Nov 26th, 2010
by David Ruzius.
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Cisco Expo

Cisco Expo

The last 2 months felt for us like the annual ‘Cisco Expo Season’ as we were attending four expo’s in a matter of weeks. ZOOM was happy to present itself and the products from the ZOOM QM Suite in Moscow – Russia, Kiev – Ukraine, Warsaw – Poland and Budapest – Hungary.

Being an exhibition partner of Cisco during Cisco Expo is for ZOOM the ideal way to meet with our partners and customers, discuss their needs, answer any contact center and quality management related questions and to present what’s new in the latest ZOOM QM Suite release.
Of course we also use Cisco Expo to catch-up and hear about the latest developments around Cisco’s Unified Communications and Contact Center products. Being part of the Cisco Developer Network we align our product road-map with Cisco’s and continuously translate Cisco’s new developments into future ZOOM product features.

This year Security, PCI-DSS compliance and Unified Communications were well covered on the Cisco Expo agenda and that provided us with some really good anchor points and topics for discussion with partners and customers because of our latest product release.

Cisco Expo Poland

Cisco Expo Poland

In addition to the new generation of ScreenREC and new features in ScoreCARD, the fresh 4.7 release of the ZOOM QM Suite has been mainly focused on security and delivers a complete PCI-DSS compliance feature set. This feature set includes full encryption with key management, enhanced password management, pause and resume functionality for call and screen recording and full auditing. A comprehensive PCI-DSS overview screen indicates to what extent all required compliance policies are enforced.

If you did not have the chance to meet us during one of the Expo’s, attend one of the product demo’s or have questions about what it means for your contact center to be PCI-DSS compliant, feel free to contact the ZOOM sales team via sales@zoomint.com

We hope to meet you during any of the upcoming Cisco Expo’s or other industry events. Keep track of where you’d be able to find ZOOM via the ZOOM news on our site.

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ZOOM QM Suite 4.7 Released

Nov 16th, 2010
by David Ruzius.
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A complete PCI-DSS compliance feature set, the next generation of ZOOM ScreenREC, ScoreCARD agent self-evaluation and much, much more…

In addition to delivering a broad range of product enhancements, this release is mainly focused on security (for PCI-DSS compliance), the release of a completely redesigned version of ScreenREC and a set of valuable ScoreCARD features such as agent self-evaluation.
In line with ZOOM’s strategy to stay up-to-date with the Cisco and Genesys platforms and latest developments in Unified Communications, this release will also bring you enhanced support for new Cisco phones, improvements in SPANless & SIP recording and improved JTAPI support.

In future blog posts we’ll deep-dive into what this release brings to your business and we’ll be discussing topics such as:

  • The need for contact centers to be PCI-DSS compliant and how your quality management solution should support you in adherence
  • The value of performing 360 degree agent evaluations and the involvement of your agents using agent self-evaluation
  • The power of the next generation of ScreenREC, your solution for agent desktop recording

Now, what does this 4.7 release bring you?

pci_logoPCI-DSS Compliance Features

ZOOM PCI-DSS Compliance Support is a set of enhancements which allows customers using ZOOM QM Suite products to meet their PCI-DSS requirements.

“PCI-DSS stands for Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard, it’s a set of requirements developed by PCI Security Standards Council, organization established by American Express, Discover Financial Services, JCB International, MasterCard Worldwide and Visa Inc. International. These requirements are mandatory for companies in credit card payment processing industry.”
Read more about PCI-DSS via  http://www.pcisecuritystandards.org/

A subset of the PCI-DSS requirements have an impact on your contact centers’ compliance recording and quality management solution. ZOOM QM Suite fulfills all PCI-DSS requirements with the ZOOM PCI-DSS Compliance Support feature set.

pci-status

PCI-DSS Status

PCI-DSS Status
ZOOM CallREC now provides an informative page indicating which ZOOM PCI-DSS features have been enabled and if all the required policies have been set.

Pause/resume support
To prevent recording of cardholder data such as CVV codes, ZOOM call and screen recording now offer pause and resume support. This feature is supported in SPAN and SPANless recording and in screen recording using ScreenREC via the CallREC API.

Enhanced password management

Password Management

Password Management

The new password management features now support:

  • Minimum required password complexity.
  • Password expiration
  • User access lockout

Call encryption support with integrated key manager
The new key manager supports:

  • Public-Key Cryptography Standards (PKCS12, JKS, JCEKS)
  • Industry standard encryption algorithms (AES, DES, Blowfish)
  • Encryption of recorded calls and captured screens
  • Support for multiple keys and random usage
  • Re-encryption support

Enhanced logging of user actions in audit log
The audit log will now capture all user log-in attempts together with an IP address identification of the user’s workstation.

Read more about ZOOM QM Suite and PCI-DSS Compliance on the ZOOM website.

ScreenREC Setup

ScreenREC Setup

New Generation ScreenREC
ZOOM’s solution for screen capture was completely redesigned and rewritten to better serve the current needs of the ZOOM QM Suite.

ScreenREC now better supports hosted environments thanks to the highly efficient method for uploading captured content and is better prepared for recording additional related interactions such as email and chat.
The new ScreenREC capture client is easy to install and uses limited resources on the agents’ workstation.

Use new ScreenREC and benefit from:

  • Pause and Resume functionality for PCI-DSS compliance
  • Captured content directly uploaded via http(s)
  • An optimized intermediate format for uploading captured content that may be stored as is and transcoded for review on demand
  • Encryption of recorded voice and video
  • Transcoding on demand and streaming capability
  • Target format after transcoding and mixing is MPEG 4 (H.264) with MP3 audio

ZOOM ScoreCARD Enhancements and New Features
ZOOM is proud to present a wide range of new features in ScoreCARD that make ScoreCARD the ideal, powerful and flexible solution for your contact center to manage the quality management process; easy, fair and informative.

Agent Self-evaluation
This new feature will greatly improve the agents’ involvement in the contact center Quality Management process.

Agent self-evaluation

Agent self-evaluation

By default agents will now have the permission to plan and complete self evaluations but of course will only be able to complete evaluations based upon their specific interactions.

The self-scoring agents will use the Evaluation Planner to plan evaluations similar to the way supervisors plan their evaluations. To prevent skewed data, agents will not be able to change any settings or influence how their self evaluations will contribute to the final 360 degrees view.

New graphs and export data to MS Excel
Use ZOOM ScoreCARD data the way you prefer. All ScoreCARD graph, chart and audit log data is now exportable as an Excel spreadsheet. Back office users can use Excel to process and analyze ScoreCARD data or create their own custom graphs.

The “League Table” and “Compare Scores” have been made available as graphs and will provide additional functionality for the end user in data management. The league graph and data exports will now contain the agent login name to provide additional information in reporting and data management.

Hidden group and question weighting in the evaluation reports
To protect the evaluation process and objectivity from potential influence by agents, the weightings are now hidden so the final scoring results can not be skewed based on any knowledge of weightings applied.

Additional ScoreCARD improvements
ZOOM partners and customers continuously push the ZOOM products forward and ZOOM takes their requirements serious. The following additional enhancements have been implemented in this release:

  • Parent and child evaluations are now accessible via links in the tool bar of the evaluator form to link parent evaluations to evaluations that have been re-evaluated. This functionality is valuable during the re-evaluation process.
  • Copy (cut and paste) from evaluation forms providing additional functionality for the user to copy and paste values between evaluation forms.
  • An option to allow evaluators to re-open their evaluations. The status will change from the “Finished” to the “In-Progress” state.
  • Show answer name in the evaluation report providing additional detail to the “Evaluation Report” when showing the specific answer name along with the scored result. The report will for example show “Yes 100%” instead of just the score of 100%. Fail all, fail group, etc. information will be shown along with the scores.
  • Read only access to finished evaluations so that agents will be able to listen to call and gain understanding how the evaluation was completed. This feature gives agents the opportunity to review interactions and better understand the companies evaluation process.

The 4.7 release also brings a number of enhancements in recording methods and changes in the offered support for phones and contact center platforms.

SPANless and SIP Recording
Various improvements have been made to the Cisco SPANless recording interface such as:

  • Improved performance
  • The recording of barged calls
  • Improved SIP session timeout implementation (RFC-4028)

SIP enhancements
The following SIP enhancements have been implemented:

  • Implementation of IP fragmentation support for SIP sniffer (RFC-791)
  • Implementation of a port number of zero in the SIP offer in SIP driver (RFC-3264)
  • The identification of calling/called parties only from first INVITE

Support for New Phones

The following series of phones have been tested for compatibility: 6900, 8900 and 9900. In addition IP phones from the 7900 series are fully supported. These phones have passed the testing scenarios for: basic call, hold, blind and consultative transfer, Ad hoc conference with and without consultation. Additional testing for Barge, cBarge, join, swap/cancel and other scenario‘s is planned.

Enhanced Display of Call Information

ZOOM CallREC now displays additional call related information which allows for better selection, analysis and troubleshooting. The following data is shown:

  • Call description
  • Call / Couple IDs
  • Call Status
  • MLM Tools flags
  • Synchronization ID
  • Media information
  • Attached data

Genesys Compatibility and Integration

  • The versions 7.5, 7.6 and 8.0 are tested compatible and both SIP server and Cisco UCM/Genesys CIM deployments are fully supported.
  • This release supports the T-server and Configuration server integration in Genesys CIM.

Cisco UCM Support and JTAPI Changes

ZOOM is dedicated to supporting the latest and even no longer supported versions of Cisco UCM. To provide full transparency, ZOOM CallREC will now indicate when an unsupported or not yet fully tested version is used. ZOOM always recommends to migrate to newer versions of Cisco UCM and to ease the upgrade effort we have improved the migration process.

Find below the list of supported and unsupported Cisco versions:

  • UCM versions (with respective JTAPI interfaces) older than 4.0 are not supported. RTS JTAPI will refuse connections and will display an error message.
  • UCM 4.0, 4.1, 4.2, 5.0 are no longer supported, however the system will function. RTS JTAPI will accept connections and will display warning message.
  • UCM versions 4.3, 5.1, 6.0, 6.1, 7.0, 7.1, 8.0 are fully supported.
  • UCM versions newer than 8.0 (including 8.5) are partially supported. RTS JTAPI will accept connections with a warning message.

Well… That’s all folks !

This release has been made available for download on the ZOOM Partner Portal and soon we’ll be offering a VMware appliance for your evaluation purposes.

As said, stay tuned for future blog posts that will discuss some of these new ZOOM QM Suite features in more detail.

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ZOOM QM Suite is offered as Genesys Quality Management via OEM Partnership

Aug 22nd, 2010
by David Ruzius.
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genesys_logoZOOM is proud to offer the products from the ZOOM QM Suite worldwide via an OEM agreement with Genesys. The products are marketed as “Genesys Quality Management” and are available from the Genesys Product portfolio.

This partnership is the result of Genesys’  decision to provide a full suite of workforce optimization technologies (WOTs) for contact centers. Genesys Quality Management will offer call and screen recording (CallREC and ScreenREC), live monitoring (LiveMON) and quality and performance management (ScoreCARD).

Contact ZOOM for more information.

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ZOOM QM Suite 4.6 Released

Jul 14th, 2010
by David Ruzius.
2 comments
Scaling up.

ZOOM QM Suite Scaling up.

Probably the heat has caused that we almost forgot to break the news that  ZOOM QM Suite version 4.6 has been released and is made available for download…

Enterprise, enterprise,enterprise, enterprise !!!

It is safe to say that this release is all about improved Enterprise Support. Supporting enterprises with their large or complex installations requires the best performance, scalability and high availability options and these are exactly those areas that have been addressed with this release.

Truly supporting  large contact centers and large  Genesys deployments  has raised the bar for ZOOM  to deliver a top-performing and enterprise class product suite and ZOOM is proud to say that with release 4.6 it has successfully delivered a true Enterprise Class product for both Genesys and Cisco environments.

This release brings you:

  • Major Database Performance Improvements
  • Improved Scalability options
  • Support for Genesys High Availability Architecture
  • JTAPI Enhancements supporting more and more complex network scenario’s

You could say that all key products from the ZOOM QM Suite have received a big  enterprise ‘power-boost’  to better support large, demanding and complex installations.

As ‘cherry on the pie’, this release also delivers new functionality and a more unified experience. Enjoy new ScoreCARD features to get your quality management program started faster, get more value for money and flexibility using ScreenREC, make your choice in OS platform and integrate ZOOM’s powerful media life-cycle management tools with IBM Tivoli. In more detail…

CallREC and ScoreCARD Unified
Enjoy an unified experience in installing and running CallREC and ScoreCARD. These two flagship products are one step closer to 100% integration.

ScoreCARD Questionaires export and import
ZOOM ScoreCARD now makes it a lot easier to get your Quality Management Program started with it’s Questionnaire Export and Import functionality.

Optimize your ScreenREC usage
ZOOM ScreenREC has undergone significant changes to support the capturing of more screens in higher resolution and allowing for flexible recording rules.

Red Hat Support
Enjoy the freedom of choice in operating system. Next to CenOS you can now choose for Red Hat Enterprise Linux to runs ZOOM products.

IBM Tivoli Support
Use provided scripts to integrate ZOOM Media Lifecycle Management with IBM Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) to seamlessly backup, archive and restore using TSM.

Read more details in the ZOOM QM Suite 4.6 Release Bulletin. The distribution of this release plus documentation is available for download via the ZOOM Partner Portal.

We’ll have a glass of champagne and then we’ll start work on the 4.7 release. Stay tuned for more product unification and a long list of new CallREC, ScreenREC and ScoreCARD features.

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