The second round of advisory board meetings was a success – amazing features that will make our clients’ lives easier are planned!
At Lightwire, we want key stakeholders to have a consistent and clear opportunity to help steer our direction. We have just wrapped up the second round of advisory board meetings with our diverse customer segments (wholesale, channel partners, and retail) to do just that. Due to the COVID-19 virus, these meetings were slightly different than we had all expected – fortunately, everyone was quick to adapt to the new technologies required in this new business environment.
Advisory Board Meetings – Round 2
This second round of advisory board meetings wasn’t just about us telling our clients what we have planned, it also served as a platform for us to hear about the needs of our clients that hadn’t yet occurred to us, and what we could be doing better. After all, we don’t want to push our ideas onto our customers, we want to tailor our efforts around their requirements. The second round helped us align our dev team priorities in line with the feedback received, and as a result, we can now confirm that these are key areas we will focus our development team on in Q2:
Tickets
An updated ticket system that gives you a holistic view of the support ticket in one place – create, read, edit, and reply to support tickets right within illume. Previously, it was difficult to figure out who has been copied in a ticket. The updated version will allow users to see who is copied in the support ticket and enable you to add/remove copied recipients.
Estimated completion time: Mid May
Illume user experience and new features
As the features in our customer portal (illume) have grown significantly, the UI has started to feel a little crowded, and as a result, new features are not as visible as we would like. We are working on redesigning illume to be more user friendly and put our new customer-led innovative features front and centre. New features will be highlighted for 3 months post-launch so that you don’t miss any of the newly requested features. Unfortunately, a large proportion of our customers are not getting the most out of their connectivity solutions as they are not logging in to illume or are unaware of the latest features, so we will be adding a new feature section to our monthly newsletter to try and make that right.
Estimated completion time: phased approach – expect incremental changes to the user experience over the coming months.
Alert acknowledgments
In order to ensure that service issues are acknowledged in the most effective way possible, all parties receiving an alert will be able to see who acknowledged the issue before them and why. As well as the ability to run a report on mute/acknowledgment setting – e.g. which ones are set to mute, for how long, why, and by who. You will be able to pull this report from the report section inside illume once the feature is completed.
Estimated completion time: Done
Real-time reporting on circuit utilisation
We plan to make illume even more powerful by adding the following features;
- Filter/report on sites by circuit utilisation
- 3 – 6 month trend, how much time spent above 80%, recommendation, “good fit/time for an upgrade”
- Report sent detailing sites that have exceeded 80% utilisation more than XYZ times in a given month
- Ability to create report themselves from a reports section
- Trend report showing peaks over 80%
- Alerting when service exceeds 80% utilisation for more than x mins
- Reports can be pulled from report section ordering circuits by % utilisation
- SMS Alerts
- Preferred method of alerting during network or service events.
- Control over who SMS’s are sent to, time of day they are sent, and under what circumstances is key.
- Reports
- Uptime report listing all service by % uptime a good idea
- Network utilisation view
Estimated completion time: pending – most likely Q3
Wholesaler ease of business
We aim to streamline our wholesaler process by adding white-labeled agreements. We assume wholesalers would need to have their customers sign an order before submitting one with Lightwire. The thought is that wholesalers could log into Illume, enter end-user detail and service type/price and Docusign would send agreement with wholesalers branding to end-user
Wholesalers are also going to be able to add their own voice retail rates to illume. Lightwire can then generate end-user billing reports for wholesalers. This would decrease the billing effort, and simplify wholesale delivery of voice services through Lightwire.
Another feature that will help wholesalers is the subscriptions expiring reports. Upon completion of this feature wholesalers and channel partners will be able to receive a 90/60/30-day breakdown of which subscriptions are about to expire. The idea behind this is that it will help wholesalers and channel partners in their upsell efforts manage churn.
Estimated completion time: pending
Voice utilisation
Allow users to get even greater insights into their 3CX/SIP/Teams Calling utilisation by allowing on-demand report generation and trends over the last three months. As well as alerts when a 3CX/SIP/Teams calling instance hit 80% utilisation rather than 100%. Wholesalers and channel partners will be able to receive reports on any clients that have hit their limit in a given month.
Estimated completion time: pending – most likely Q3
Miscellaneous
Other features that are planned for the second quarter;
- Documents/Resources section
- eNews digest
- ratecards
- API Access
- Network events and voice billing present the most potential value
- Disable flapping alerts on 4G services (done)
- Channel partners will have invoices generated for them by Lightwire (Expected end May)
- Decreases CP admin overhead
- Summary of services/payments will still be sent for reconciliation purposes
