Unified communications: End of the line for the phone?
They are ready to invest heavily in a shipment of your new and improved flux capacitor - a sale equivalent to the GDP of a medium sized African nation.
If you can clinch this you'll be wearing a jet pack to fly up the greasy pole.
But Bob isn't answering the phone and you don't know where he is, or who else may be able to help you.
Your dreams of early retirement on your yacht in the Caribbean slip away into the ether.
Is there anything that could have avoided this?
Well, if the hype is to be believed, unified communications (UC) may have saved the day.
Tech talk
Jargon like this can seem daunting to those uninitiated in the dark arts of IT and telephony.
But what it actually means is bringing together all of the communication tools you use on a daily basis - phone, email, messaging, even video conferencing and social media - and running them from a single platform.
This should allow you to see where your staff are, if they're available, if a colleague can help instead - in the office and also when they're on the move - all from one simple interface.
You can then choose how you contact staff and customers.
Dial it in
Lebara provides low-cost international telephone calls.
At their contact center in the City of London they expect to handle around 5m calls over the next year.
"The suite gives us instantaneous reporting so we can easily see that marketing, for example, have sent a message that's been misunderstood by our callers, we can see a spike in calls in literally seconds, and we can respond right away."
When agents aren't busy, they can be redirected to customer courtesy calls, through a sophisticated "blended dialer" system. Customers can give feedback on the experience, and Lebara are able to analyse call data to make sure they have enough agents serving each country they operate in.
Matt Kemp is head of operations for customer services and he says that contrary to expectations, the system is easy to use.
"One of the beauties of the system is that I can probably train anyone to record a message and put it on in 10 minutes."
"If we have a major issue we can get a message on there immediately."
"If you think about the different elements of UC, and you apply it to a business scenario here at Lebara, you have a front office and back office operation that need to be tightly integrated.
Avaya's Nigel Moulton says this niche use of UC is just one of many.
"If you have elements of the business that aren't integrated, you end up with an ineffective way of dealing with customers, and perhaps a cultural set-up within the company that doesn't allow you to be as flexible as you would like."
Mr Moulton believes that the principles of UC can be applied to most businesses.
"If you think about the average day for the knowledge worker in any organisation - the things they have to process on an average day - email, voicemail, team meetings, collaboration, messaging, all of these things are now pretty prevalent on every employees desktop and they also by and large exist on mobile phones.
"If you want teams to be as productive and collaborative as they can be then you need to give them a common set of tools and applications to use on a daily basis, and these should integrate as seamlessly as possible with their telephony systems and messaging systems."
The company's latest offering is the Avaya Flare user experience that can be used with an optional desktop video device. The plan is to roll this out to other devices such as tablets and mobiles.
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