Most companies rely on several different types of roles and workers to ensure that their services or product reach their customers: retailers have desk-based roles for buyers and management but also a huge number of staff that work within stores and in stocking and storage, for example. The same is true in hotels where the concierge is just one desk-based role that is flanked by numerous housekeeping staff, porters and security guards that together deliver the end customer experience. This is also the case with medical facilities such as hospitals and care homes where admin staff man systems and IT, for example, while nurses, clinicians, custodians, janitors and security staff often literally whizz around the premises to ensure that patients are tended to in a timely and effective fashion. 

These highly mobile workers that do not carry out their main tasks from a single spot, but need to move from table to table, room to room or patient to patient have been named “frontline workers” because they are often the face of an organization with the public. Microsoft recently reported that 88% of organisations globally have frontline workers1, making them a significant majority. 

In addition to representing a huge portion of the workforce, unlike most desk-based colleagues, frontline workers come face-to-face with the end-users of products or services daily and, as such, are often presented with the most urgent or pressing demands. Despite this, however, the attention devoted to ensuring they have the tools and information required to respond to these urgent frontline demands has been somewhat lacking over the years, leaving them with a more limited range of tools and options to communicate with each other and with the rest of the workforce than their desk-based counterparts.

Specifically, frontline workers tend to rely mostly on voice communication which is more immediate and suited to high-pressure and face-to-face interactions with customers, and as a result, typically use DECT technology for high-quality, consistent, and flexible voice communications. To manage and secure voice traffic, businesses have thus traditionally relied on connecting legacy PBXs to collaboration platforms with a Session Border Controller (SBC), but as legacy PBXs get older and more difficult to maintain and manage, SBCs can be increasingly challenging to set up and manage. This raises the overall cost of keeping frontline workers connected and also presents multiple failure points. 

Frontline workers also require handsets that are engineered to meet the environmental needs of their roles from withstanding bumps or falls and sterilization as well as contact with chemical particles. These devices, in turn, should integrate seamlessly with legacy PBX infrastructure where that has not been retired yet, as well as with the latest UC&C platforms cloud call control elements.  

Recently, there has been a huge acceleration in the take-up and development of collaboration tools that have developed into complete platforms of cloud-native applications. In fact, between March 2020 and November 2021, the monthly use of Microsoft Teams alone on the frontline grew by 400%1 (Microsoft, 2022). 

Because of its popularity and pervasiveness, integration with Microsoft Teams SIP Gateway is one of the key solutions that frontline workers can truly benefit from. The new integration between DECT devices and Microsoft Teams launched earlier this year means that frontline DECT users can now finally be connected directly to Teams too, with DECT devices available as a recognised device in the Teams admin console.   

In addition to keeping the business more connected and providing timely access to information for frontline workers, this integration also enables information flows that move in the opposite direction – from the field to desk-based colleagues- to become more timely and efficient, contributing to better decision-making throughout the whole business.  

Finally, thanks to DECT device integration with Microsoft Teams, expensive legacy systems can finally be retired with a seamless move to the cloud and no loss of functionality. Cumbersome legacy PBXs and SBCs, with their associated costs and complexity, become obsolete, and all workers can finally be covered with services ranging from basic telephony requirements to more complex telephony and application-based systems such as mandated Lone Worker protection.

 

Author: Julien Bertheuil, Managing Director EMEA at Spectralink Corporation

 

 



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