At the heart of Wildix’s business lies unified communications. Everything is built with the end-user in mind, whether it’s the video, text and audio calls that are in its communication solution or the telephony product that lets you send and receive those calls to anyone in the world. It’s all unified, and that’s the key difference between unified communications and … well … ordinary communications.
Integral to that unification is the way Wildix can integrate a huge range of software, whether it’s your standard door phone and video camera (letting you safely check those waiting to come in) or entire complex suites such as Salesforce, Zendesk, Hubspot or Zoho. But what’s really grabbing attention is the way Wildix systems can integrate AI, especially in its advanced product, x‑bees.
Artificial intelligence has been transforming businesses. Most people are aware of solutions such as ChatGPT, but there’s so much more to it than that. Integrating AI into your business communications means you can get automatic transcriptions, advanced suggestions, live coaching and so much more. This is the second wave of AI, and it’s here to radically change businesses everywhere.
To justify the investment into new technologies such as AI, AI needs to deliver on its promise and provide a return on investment to businesses.
From a business perspective, having AI create call summaries and upload complete transcriptions to a database — such as a customer relationship management suite like Salesforce — can save an incredible amount of time. That time means salespeople can focus more on the sales aspect of their business rather than having to endlessly transcribe notes. It means they could prepare for the next call more effectively, or it could mean they can hop straight on to another call afterward. It allows people to focus on their job.
If I’m a sales guy, I don’t have to do anything admin-related. And because it’s automatic, there’s no excuse for missing notes — it benefits their managers too. It enables better sales intelligence as you can see:
- What converts people
- If there are phrases or statements that put people off
- How effective each sales rep actually is
- What are our top performers doing that we can leverage as best practices
It reduces the workload for managers as well, as so much is automated. Quick summaries can reduce the need to listen to calls and eliminate snap judgments based on one or two narrow data points. You get access to trends and actionable data.
Then there are other AI‑powered features such as voicebots. These use generative AI to build an AI voice — not like the dead-feeling ones that you hear on TikTok videos but instead human-sounding voices, complete with breathing and other sounds you’d expect from a human. But they’re actually a very well-trained AI that can handle calls — far better than most interactive voice response systems can. Instead of getting stuck in a potential loop sometimes where the only option is to hang up and try again, you get an AI that learns to prevent those kinds of things from happening. The result is better customer satisfaction and a reduction of workload for staff. I’ve seen stats that suggest anything from a 10% to 50% reduction in workload just by having AI answer repetitive questions. And if the customer wants or needs a human, the AI can redirect customers to one.
AI Is the Way Forward For Businesses
At its simplest, AI handles many of the boring tasks that humans don’t want to handle. As someone who works in sales, I don’t want to spend my life inside a CRM. I want to be doing the stuff that’s interesting — building systems, solving problems and delivering value to customers. The last thing I want after a 3‑hour call is to have to go through that call and put it all into our CRM and hope I haven’t missed anything vital.
Instead, I let AI do it.
The same applies to helpdesk agents, tech support and anyone else who has to handle calls from customers.
AI is here to stay, and it doesn’t matter what you or I think about it. It’s going to be adopted by businesses in the same way that cars removed horses from the streets of New York in just 10 years a century ago. Or how automated telephony exchanges removed operators from long-distance telephony systems in the 1900s.
Everything changes in business, and it’s the nature of the beast. As soon as something can be automated, it is, and resistance to its adoption rarely makes business sense.
Unified Communications Doesn’t Have to Be Complicated
One of the more common issues I deal with is the idea that adding AI is complex. But it doesn’t have to be.
Wildix takes away the complexity of dealing with AI. Our partners, such as Hiscall, install the system, and they can help you manage it. That way, you focus on what you do best: running your business.
And you can start with rudimentary AI to see how it works. One of the simplest is an integration between my calendar and our unified communications solution, x‑bees. It can take what I have in my calendar and display it. That way, you can see whether I’m on a call, if I’m on PTO or if I’m available. Then, if someone wants to schedule an urgent meeting with me, they can immediately check to see when I’m available.
Then take that one stage further: automated calendar checking. If there are a few of us who need to be in a meeting, they can use AI to search for a mutually convenient time. Lots of little convenient features soon build up over time, resulting in a surprising amount of time saved.
None of this is particularly complicated, and it works with existing software. Internally, we use Google Calendar to manage our meeting scheduling. There’s nothing new to learn there, as the system works with Google Calendar. It also works with MS 365.
As you gradually get more comfortable with AI, you can move on to the more complex ones — although as I said, your partner can handle the actual integrations. You might have a database with inventory, SKUs, supporting products and a whole lot more data. AI can take all of that and help your customers self-serve more effectively. They could ask a question about stock levels or even if a certain product works with another one, and AI can answer that effectively. With good training on the datasets, it can deliver a better-than-human result, and it won’t leave the company after a couple of years.
So from a sales engineering perspective, we definitely geeked out at all the possibilities of AI. One of my colleagues set up a test platform that was based on a gym’s booking system. You could call up, say, to book a Zumba class at 6 p.m. on a Tuesday, and the AI would respond, confirm that there were spaces, and automatically book it. The system sent a notification to the “gym” that a customer had booked, and the customer would get an automatic follow-up confirmation via SMS. It felt very human.
Why Wildix?
Wildix always stands out. We have a great unified communications system that simply works — and we’re supported by a global network of partners. When it comes to AI, our solutions can integrate almost anything, and we have a great technical support team that can build new ideas into it, if it’s not there already. Our partners are supported by sales engineers like me, and it results in this incredible holistic experience for our customers.
So if you want to build out your perfect system, talk to an expert. We can connect you to the right partner to create the right solution for your needs. Visit wildix.com/try to book a demo.
About the Author
Matt Hostacky is an Ohio native who has handled a huge range of telephony systems prior to becoming a sales engineer for Wildix. This start led to cloud telephony before finally joining Wildix in 2022, where he discovered the benefits of a system that could truly do it all. He currently lives in Cleveland, commiserating the consistency of the Cleveland Browns.
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