CounterPath Corporation announced that Thing5, a premier provider of managed voice and data services to over 1,400 hotels across North America, has chosen CounterPath’s Quick Conference solution as part of its hospitality offering.
Quick Conference is an enterprise-grade conferencing solution that provides management, sales and marketing personnel with their own conference number for anywhere, anytime access to conferencing services. The solution, which is sold under the Thing5 brand, is currently in use by a variety of nationwide hotel operations.
“Since introducing Quick Conference at the beginning of 2008 we’ve sold over 1,000 reserved conferencing accounts with new users being added to the service every day,” said Bill Faxon, managing director, Thing5. “Hotels clearly see the long-term benefit of having conferencing bundled with their existing voice and data services. Not only are employees able to communicate with greater ease and accelerate decision making processes, but hotels also enjoy simplified provisioning and support of services when dealing with a single voice and data service provider.”
Quick Conference has also been integrated with Thing5’s services management dashboard, a Web-based service portal that provides users with point-and-click accessibility to their essential messaging services. Users can launch Quick Conference’s Web management interface from the Thing5 service portal and, after authenticating via LDAP services, can visually manage their conference call from their PC. Administrative options like muting and removing participants, viewing dialed-in participants’ lines and who is speaking, locking the conference and accessing detailed and summary reports are some of the many actions conference moderators can engage during and after the conference with the Thing5 dashboard.
Quick Conference also allows Thing5 to provision conferencing services based on users’ specific needs. The number of participants that can join a bridge, the use of wideband codecs and the ability to record a conference call can all be added or removed to the conferencing experience to optimize cost-to-service requirements of different employees within the business. In addition, as new conferencing features become available, users can be upgraded with only the features that are applicable to their conferencing needs – ensuring that a hotel’s investment is always tailored around the individual requirements of their employees.
“Thing5 is a trusted leader in servicing the voice and data needs of the hospitality industry and we are proud that they have selected Quick Conference as a value-added service to hotels across North America,” said Rob Brown, vice president of customer marketing, CounterPath. “Every decision made within a hotel’s business is focused on selling rooms, and supporting and enhancing the guest experience. With Quick Conference, multiple operational experts can initiate a conference in seconds to formulate business-critical decisions – whether in response to customer inquiries, supplier negotiations, or operational planning. Quick Conference is an essential component to driving operational efficiency and enabling the best guest experience possible for today’s hoteliers.”