This week, the hardware team behind the MC74 were recognized in Essen, Germany, at the 2017 Red Dot Gala. The Red Dot Design Award is an international award for the best product designs, design firms, and design concepts around the world. This was the first time Meraki products were entered, and we were honored to be awarded in the Product Design category.
The MC74 was chosen as a winner out of more than 5,500 products from 54 countries. The winners were chosen by a jury of 39 experts, and they had high praise for the MC74, saying, “The remarkably discreet desk telephone has a timeless design, offers high user-friendliness and is laid out for years of service.”
As part of the award, the MC74 will be featured in the Red Dot Design Museum Essen until 2018.
The Red Dot helps remind us that here at Meraki, it is important to keep building products with the end user in mind. Good design enables people to do work with less overhead, and that is the standard we strive towards in every product.
To try the beautiful MC74 in your own environment, call a sales rep today for a risk-free trial.
Administrators can now set custom schedules, and rest assured that callers will be directed based on when they are calling.
Let’s take Tony’s Auto Dealership as an example. During the day, Tony wants his customers to be able to call the dealership and learn about business hours, hear the deals of the month, or reach the service team. However, Tony knows that customers calling in at night are likely to need emergency assistance. To accomplish this, he sets up his Meraki Communications IVR to route to his normal message during work hours, and to route to an ‘office closed’ IVR with an emergency service line at night.
MC users can now set up any of these rules with just a couple clicks, all in the dashboard. Build schedules based on specific business needs, and empower callers to find the answers they’re looking for, as quickly as possible.
E911, or Enhanced 911, is a system in North America that provides the caller’s phone number and physical address to the emergency responder when an emergency call is made. In the rest of the world, a similar feature is often called caller location.
For customers that like to be prepared in case of emergencies, Dashboard will now display the exact street address associated with each MC74. If there is a mismatch between what is configured in Dashboard and what the provider is reporting, the following error will appear. This way, IT administrators can ensure that locations are always up-to-date if 911 is called.
Default addresses can also be configured in Dashboard to update the network in bulk – this is handy when moving buildings, or adding to your deployment. This setting can be found under Network wide -> Configure -> General and will update all the phones in your network that do not have a customized address.
Just in time for the new year, the MC engineering team has been hard at work building exciting new MC solutions for different use cases. Today, for businesses that have receptionists or executive assistants, say goodbye to archaic attendant consoles, and hello to the improved MC74.
For customers that already have an MC solution, call into the Meraki support line to have these beta features enabled on your existing hardware, free of charge.
The MC74 can now make and receive calls on up to 8 lines, to manage all the different phone numbers that your business runs on. These lines can be set easily through the dashboard. All inbound calls will indicate which number they are calling, and outbound calls can use a simple drop-down menu on the dial screen to select which line to use.
For executive assistants that manage multiple high-priority lines, favorite contacts can be set and seen in a separate tab on the contacts page. This will also work in the phone portal.
Not only will Favorites provide quick access to specific priority contacts, the Presence feature will also alert you to the status of each of those contacts. If they are on a call, the presence button will turn red, and if they are open to a call, it will be green.
However, even if someone’s line is available, they themselves might not be. In this case, receptionists may want to do a warm transfer and ask if the person can take a call. To accomplish this, we’ve added the Ask to Transfer feature, which allows you to check in with the person you want to transfer to, and either transfer the call over or cancel the transfer if the person is busy.
Not all calls that come in are urgent, and sometimes the caller simply wants to leave a voicemail. In these cases, we’ve built a Send to Voicemail feature that allows you to transfer a call directly to the inbox of any other MC74 in your network.
