Our new hosted PBX onboarding wizard saves time, increases efficiency, and frees up your most experienced engineers. What once took hours and required the involvement of senior engineers with good knowledge of PortaSwitch can now be performed by junior personnel in just a few minutes (about 30 clicks!).
Here are just a few examples of what our cloud PBX onboarding wizard can help you do:
- Enter basic customer info
- Add new extensions and choose a package of services for each extension
- Choose the main phone number from the available DID inventory
- Create hunt groups and call queues
- Set up auto-attendant IVR menus, prompts, and actions
- Add more DIDs
- Update settings for existing customers
During our recent webinar, we demoed all of these tasks – and even more – for three different onboarding scenarios:
- Provisioning new hosted PBXs from a confirmed purchase order (potentially self-service by a customer)
- Provisioning a new cloud PBX from a template (plus how to configure the template)
- Modifying cloud PBX services for an existing customer
In our live poll, we asked participants what major challenges they had when provisioning a new cloud PBX. Here’s what they told us:
- Time-to-market 21%
- Skills shortage 23%
- Complexity (additional integrations) 51%
- other 5%
Good news! Our cloud PBX onboarding wizard relieves these pains too. You can use this tool to build integrations with other applications and systems, such as CRM, accounting or ticketing systems, or number portability management. This is possible thanks to the visual low-code Boomi Flow, which powers our tool. Your team can have access to the application “source code” (or, rather, the visual diagram) and change your copy. Even non-developers can create basic integrations themselves (for instance, opening a request in ERP to ship phones to the customer).
It’s also a big help when migrating a customer from another PBX (like BroadSoft, Avaya, or Asterisk) to PortaSwitch: you can save a lot of time by uploading extensions from a CSV file. And, generally, instead of involving engineering resources in the data migration (like extensions, hunt groups, DID numbers), you can offload the work to other people, even those with low technical skills. Put the job into the hands of:
- Your PortaSwitch admin
- A reseller
- Or even the customers themselves!
And, just like every PortaOne solution, this tool is not some out-of-the-box generic product – you can customize it to be a perfect fit. That’s a crucial benefit, since the process of PBX onboarding is different in every company, and even within every company as your business evolves. You can either do the customizations yourself, or contact us for assistance at any time.
Watch the webinar recording for more details on this tool:
Webinar Q&A highlights
Q: Is the cloud PBX wizard built into PortaSwitch like a Customer Self Care Portal?
A: The сloud PBX wizard is an iPaaS Workflows application that runs in the cloud and connects to your PortaSwitch. This allows you to have access to it immediately, without updating your PortaSwitch (even if you are running an older MR!) – and (most importantly) as we will be adding new features and releasing new versions of the wizard, you’ll have immediate access to new functionalities.
Bundling a user-facing component (like the onboarding wizard or PBX subscriber self-care portal) requires frequent changes and customizations – so it does not make sense to put it inside of PortaSwitch, which should be as stable as possible. So, to speed up your time-to-market and growth, we’re preserving the existing, built-in Customer Self-Care Portal and developing an alternative PBX Self-Care Portal that will be part of iPaaS. This will offer much better UX and development speeds.
Q: Can we build all these functions ourselves with the PortaSwitch API?
A: The wizard only uses the standard PortaSwitch API to retrieve/update the data. If you have development resources, you certainly can make a similar app yourself – and we have clients who have done just that in the past. But finding the right developers is not easy, development costs are significant, and you can’t forget that it requires ongoing maintenance (e.g., when a new feature becomes available in PortaSwitch). But with our cloud PBX wizard, you get a working tool from day one. And since it’s using visual low-code Boomi, your engineer can customize it or add new integrations in a fraction of the time it would take to develop the whole app from scratch.
Q: Will this tool work with on-premise installations of PortaSwitch or only with the cloud version?
A: It doesn’t matter if you use an on-premise installation or a cloud version of PortaSwitch – the wizard will work with both, since the tool will be available as a separate app via iPaaS. You won’t have to update if you have an MR75+ release. As for older versions of PortaSwitch, the tool will most likely work with them too – reach out to us for more details on your specific case.
Q: Which CRM platforms can CSPs integrate with this tool?
A: There is a set of existing Boomi connectors for many popular CRMs, such as SalesForce, Microsoft Dynamics, or SugarCRM. And even if your CRM is not on the list, a new connector can be created for virtually any CRM/ERP that has REST API. You will, however, need an adjustment in the Boomi integration workflows and data mapping (e.g. to define that customer’s attribute “Company Tax ID” from CRM translates to a custom field “TaxID” in PortaBilling).
We can create this integration as a professional service, or your team can do it themselves (you can find lots of training materials on the Boomi website). As a rough estimate, it’ll take about a couple of days to build a new integration with a CRM system – still dramatically less than if you had to build the integration from scratch and actually code.
Q: How does number porting work with this wizard?
A: For the number porting feature, you might need to adjust the tool since every country has a different framework. With such cases, you can come to us. We’ll analyze your requirements and what’s available in your country. Then you can implement the integration with your local number portability framework yourself, or we can do this for you as a professional service.
Q: Are we able to assign SIP phones to phone lines, to enable zero-touch phone provisioning?
A: Not at this moment. However, the device inventory and phone association are available via API, so it’s possible that this will be added soon – or, you can add it yourself. Contact us to discuss your specific needs and find the best way forward.
