On June 18^th, 2024, we hosted an early edition of iPECS Insights, our monthly forum for partner-led thought leadership and learning.

This month’s session was led by Alon Elmasel, Product Manager of our Israeli partners at Bezeq International, with support from Bezeq International’s Collaboration Solutions Engineer Dror Boteh Ah-El.

The title was “MS Teams integration and voice AI,” and this fantastic talk was dedicated to two major projects delivered by Bezeq using the power of iPECS.

About Bezeq

After an introduction from Reggie Shin of Ericsson-LG Enterprise, Alon introduced Bezeq International. Bezeq International is Israel’s leading internet service and telecommunications provider, managing approximately 40% of the country’s internet traffic.

It fully owns the JONAH cable system that links Israel to Europe, as well as operating six data centers throughout Israel.

As an Ericsson-LG Enterprise partner, Bezeq International is able to leverage this capacity to meet the most complex enterprise communication needs. Their presentation was about two examples of this, in the form of the Histradut union and Fattal Hotel chain.

Working with partners

Both solutions were provided in partnership with AudioCodes, an Israeli-American provider of integrations, software, session border controllers (SBCs), and services for enterprise communications providers. Listed on the Nasdaq and with over 30 years of experience in the sector, AudioCodes is one of the leading businesses in its field.

Histradut project

Histradut is the largest workers’ union in Israel, with 100 branches across the country. Bezeq agreed to provide all 100 branches with voice, starting with the head office.

One of Histradut’s biggest priorities was the ability to work from home. They were using a PBX, which was configured to be 100% office-based. This made remote work an impossibility. In this scenario, a cloud solution would often be the first recommendation but Histradut insisted on a PBX for security reasons.

Given the client’s need for higher capacity, Bezeq International’s solution began with the iPECS UCM. This was integrated with Microsoft Teams using an SBC from AudioCodes. The SBC was configured to direct calls both to desk phones and Azure, which enabled voice over Teams.

As Alon pointed out, this enabled the customer to work from home with a PBX – a huge difference to their quality of life, with iPECS as the foundation.

Fattal Hotel chain: phase one

Alon then introduced the next project, which was the Fattal Hotel chain. Fattal is the largest hospitality chain in Israel, with 41 hotels across the country and over 2,000 in Europe under the name Leonardo.

This project came in two phases. The first was to create a centralized communication platform for all 41 Israeli hotels, with a single central guest service. This was provided via two iPECS UCM servers in two different data centers, to which the service center and hotels were connected via VPN. This solution delivered high availability and security, while networking all Fattal hotels with the service center.

Fattal Hotel chain: phase two

Alon then presented phase two of the project, which was a fantastic example of innovation using iPECS. For phase two, Bezeq International and AudioCodes integrated the solution with VoiceAI Connect. This is communication hub between any bot framework, communication system, and cognitive speech service.

It allows guests to call the service center and have their queries resolved by AI. The solution recognizes their request, and in many cases can resolve it for them (for example, if it is a routine query). It transcribes all interactions, and allows human users to assume control of the interaction at any point.

This has delivered many benefits to Fattal, including:

• significant reduction in call volumes (35% of calls are completely resolved by the bot)
• reducing the number of agents per shift
• it works 24/7
• it improves guest experience
• it frees agents to handle more complex enquiries

The power of partnership

These were fantastic case studies from Bezeq International, and show the power of Ericsson-LG Enterprise. Following a brief Q&A session, Alon and Dror mentioned that other hotels were interested in a similar solution. They also offered to advise partners if they wanted to deploy a similar solution.

This shows the power of partnership, and the collaborative potential of these sessions. This was a truly innovative solution, and as Reggie Shin from Ericsson-LG Enterprise pointed out, it shows the true power of the iPECS product range.