2020 Q2 Newsletter June 30

[Emily R]

    Quarterly Newsletter  June 2020

We hope you, your loved ones, and your colleagues are doing well and staying safe. It’s been a busy quarter for 2600Hz and everyone on our team from Engineering to QA and Operations to Marketing have been working hard to bring you more tools that enable productive remote work. In case you missed it, we released a ton of new products, features, and functionality and we have a lot more great things planned for Q3.  

Key Highlights From Q2

As part of our commitment to enabling remote work, we reprioritized our roadmap and brought our customers the comm.io desktop app. Video conferencing, a WebRTC-based softphone (we call it a web phone), virtual faxing, and more are built in, giving users all of their personalized communication information and tools in one place, right on their desktop or laptop. Check out the new comm.io site to see all that it can do!

What Do You Want In An Operator Console?

We are continually enhancing our product suite so we can provide you with the best reseller and end user tools that will help your business be successful. We are going to start sending out product surveys to get your input and to help us identify exactly what you and your customers need. We’re currently working on improving our Operator Console and have a few questions for you based on your customer’s requests and feedback when it comes to operator and attendant functionality. Please take our short 6 question survey that won’t take more than 2 minutes of your time. Your response will make a difference! You can take the survey here.

Other New Product Releases & Updates

In addition to releasing comm.io, we rolled a TON of new updates, features, and functionality in Q2 and already have more in the works that we’re planning to roll out in Q3. In case you missed it, here are some of the exciting releases and updates from Q2:  

SMS — You can now send and receive SMS on most 2600Hz DIDs! Receiving inbound SMS is configurable via Webhooks and outbound SMS can be sent by utilizing our APIs or Zapier. If you have a Zapier account, you can connect SMS by Zapier with over 2,000 apps to create automations and custom notifications. Another great thing about SMS, you ask? You can send and receive SMS on softphones and any desk phone that supports message notifications! There truly are infinite useful and creative ways to utilize SMS...check out this blog for some interesting use cases and examples!

Voicemail Transcription — This feature helps users stay connected by converting voicemails to text. Transcriptions can be emailed or viewed in the Voicemails section of Comm.io. The feature is powered by Google’s ARS system, so it has phenomenal accuracy. There is a fee for using this feature ($0.05 per minute) so it is off by default for all existing voicemail boxes. New voicemail boxes currently have the feature enabled (although we're going to be changing it to be off by default in the next update) so if you don't want to use it, you'll need to disable it. It’s easy to enable or disable — watch how to do it here! 

Announce-Only Voicemail Box — Perfect for closures and other informational messages, announce-only voicemail box enables a voicemail box to play a recorded message without allowing callers to leave a voicemail. This feature can be enabled and messages can be easily changed at any time in the Voicemail Boxes section of SmartPBX by going to Advanced, then Options. 

Hold Music Resume — Hold music no longer restarts at the beginning every time you put a caller on hold! This is ideal for custom/sales messages because callers will now hear a continuation of the message, instead of it restarting at the beginning every time the caller is placed on hold.  
 

We’re already planning our first release of Q3, so keep an eye on your email! 

In Case You Missed It

It wouldn’t be a 2600Hz newsletter without some media and press updates. Here’s some news and a few marketing highlights from Q2: 

• UC Today published not one but two exciting articles featuring the 2600Hz team —  SMS is Key to COVID-Era Business Survival and 2600Hz Intros Beta Softphone & Video Conferencing.
• We rolled out a series of video tutorials about how to get started with KAZOO to help new partners get up and running in no time. Check them out here. 
• 2600Hz was featured in UC Today’s UC Market Guide 2020 and our very own Patrick Sullivan contributed an article about the often-overlooked characteristic of UC providers & their solutions. Download it here. 
• Patrick was also invited to do a video podcast with The UC Buyer, which you can check out here.
• We published new blogs about provisioning devices, business agility and SMS. 
• We added a few new podcasts to our podcast page here. 

A Few Friendly Reminders

2600Hz Community — Are you a member? It’s a forum where you can join in on timely discussions with your peers, get support for all things KAZOO, and find the latest 2600Hz resources. You don’t have to be a 2600Hz customer to be a member, but our customers do get access to additional resources and documentation. We’re making the forums even more user friendly, updating many of the documents, and adding even more support docs for our users and resellers. If you aren’t part of our community yet, join today and keep an eye out for exciting updates! Visit the community here. 

Free UC w/ 2600Hz Podcast — Our podcast is still going strong and we’ve added a few episodes this quarter that you definitely don’t want to miss! To make listening even easier for you, we created a new podcast page that gives you access to all 20 episodes in one place. Check it out here, and don’t forget to bookmark the page since we’ll continue adding to it!

Monthly Business Partner Calls — If you’re a paid 2600Hz customer, these are for you! On the 3rd Wednesday of each month, we hold an interactive call with our CEO and Co-Founder Darren Schreiber. During each call, Darren shares need-to-know information that applies to your business and is available to answer any questions you may have. This is the ideal opportunity to engage with Darren on a regular basis while learning about important updates that can help your business thrive. Find more information about our next call here.

That’s our update for now! We’ve been working hard and will have a lot more exciting news and updates for you soon, so keep an eye on your inbox and don’t forget to follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.