The Big Switch Off: Embracing cloud-based communications

With The Big Switch Off on the horizon – the pivotal moment in December 2025 where analogue telephone systems will become obsolete as all companies switch to cloud based systems – who better to guide you through the change than boxxe with our in-house dedicated, Unified Communications expert, Lewis Barnes? 

We work with a portfolio of trusted partners in the UCaaS and CCaaS space in order to accelerate the connections that matter to your business, so we're really excited to announce our partnership with Vonage.

There are a number of reasons we’re excited to partner with Vonage, not least because we think they have an incredibly well-rounded solution to offer now, and in the future.  After all, their system is set up to be hyper adaptable to changes in the way we work – but more on that later. 

Vonage has a massive footprint in the UCaaS space (Unified Communications-as-a-service), being well-known for their innovative technology and supreme reliability.  They’ve recently been acquired by Ericsson, an international, multi-billion pound telecoms provider, who are very keen on research and development (R&D), which is good news for all of us. 

Their huge investments in R&D are designed to bring customer satisfaction to the fore, bringing out new functionality and tech updates to ensure you get the best service possible – and as you know, at boxxe, customer centric tech solutions are what it’s all about. 

Digital innovation and transformation is their blood. Vonage is determined to expand and improve on the way in which we work with people, by giving them different options and opening up new opportunities through their UCaaS and CCaas (Contact Centre-as-a-Service).

Their offering allows you to change the way you work with different customers and clients – it’s completely adaptable. And you can make it unique; you choose your line of communication, depending on the task at hand, the person you’re working with and how best they might respond to that. You have control over your working relationship with both employees and clients. 

Which is why we’re so delighted with this partnership.  Cloud-based systems are the future, and we want to help you get there, in the most efficient, cost effective and results driven way. 

Vonage have two key offerings, with lots of additional integrations and functionality:

1. UCaaS which is simply a cloud phone system which allows you to make and receive calls over the internet. 
   

2. CCaaS which pulls together customer interactions and contacts from multiple mediums – including WhatsApp, Facebook messenger, Live Chat, AI bots and phone calls – allowing agents to deal with customers from any of their digital channels, from anywhere in the world.

This omni-channel comms capability is really important for any modern business, as customers expect to be able to contact companies via the medium of their choice, which often differs between different generations.  For example, 55% of Boomers prefer customer service via phone calls, compared to Gen Z’s 38%, whose preferences for email and text based chat customer support follows closely behind.

UCaas and CCaaS solutions are all manned by automation, AI and of course, people.  As leaders in the AI comms industry Vonage are continuously working on useful features – their AI Studio is a low/no code tool which users can use to design, create and deploy AI conversations – with little experience. 

They also offer an innovative speech analytics solution called Conversation Analyzer, which can identify speakers and their emotions in order to intelligently route it to an agent who is best suited to deal with the issue at hand.  All calls are also transcribed so agents have a historical overview of previous comms with a client. 

And easy to use.  For boxxe, that’s the key to making tech human; it’s got to work for you, and deliver exactly what you need from it. Thanks to COVID we all had to pivot and switch to hybrid working environments, sharpish.  There was no time to make more considered decisions about remote working solutions – it was do or die. Now that pressure has gone, we’re here to help you embrace cloud communications and find the right solution for your business; one that can save you time and money. 

There’s no need to change everything – many of you continue to use trusty Microsoft Teams.  In fact, boxxe holds the UK's largest Microsoft EA agreement, and we LOVE MS Teams!  We see the importance of leveraging MS Teams, and the Vonage solution does exactly that by embedding into the Native Teams dialler. This provides a familiar user interface and allows your employees to make phone calls directly out of Teams with ease.  This also provides another layer of resilience in the case of a Teams outage, as the phone system is still accessible via the web browser. Vonage also has an impressive uptime reliability of 99.999% across its solution.  So, your UCaaS can look like Teams and function like Teams, with the power of Vonage’s tech to enhance reliability and functionality behind it.  We’ve also found Salesforce becoming more and more popular in public sector organisations, including central and local gov, and even police forces.  Again, Vonage integrates with Salesforce better than anyone else on the market.

Alongside backup and disaster recovery, automatic software updates and deep analytics the case for ‘switching off’ and ‘switch to’ Vonage is clear. 

If you’re one of the 60% of businesses who still have a legacy phone system, it’s time to get the ball rolling.

Book in to talk through your current systems, the options available, and how we could help you make The Big Switch.

Read more about the big PSTN switch off.