From ATI

SEE THE OFFICIAL PRESS RELEASE HERE

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

 
Advanced Telecommunications of Illinois, Inc.

October 3, 2022

 

Advanced Telecommunications of Illinois, Inc. (ATI) Merges with Ascenda & Third Generation.

 

ATI, the leader in Total Customer Care for on-premise and cloud phone system deployment and support, has merged with Ascenda & Third Generation, under the Ascenda name, thereby strengthening presence in the enterprise customer experience technology global market.

 

Lisle, IL, 10/3/2022 ATI, the leading one stop shop for all business telecom, cloud, and networking needs, has merged with Ascenda, (ATI) (Lisle, IL) & Third Generation. (Pittsburgh, PA) ATI together with Ascenda & Third Generation have elected to rebrand under the Ascenda name. The official announcement was made at their headquarters in Lisle, IL at 8am CDT. The move to merge with Ascenda & Third Generation first started in July of 2022. The process took 60 days and the deal was signed today, October 3, 2022.

“Merging teams with ATI & Third Generation was a no-brainer,” said Jonathon Shaver, Senior Managing Director, Ascenda. “They’ve implemented, and supported thousands of customers over the past 40 years with the latest communication technology, and will be great assets in providing a white-glove approach to our SMB & Enterprise clients.”

The merger with Ascenda & Third Generation fits into ATI’s strategy to bring the leading customer experience technology to its 4,000+ clients, by managing the entire consultative process in-house with Ascenda’s team, who has been recognized globally by multiple Gartner leading providers.

 

ATI’s current team will all still be working under the Ascenda umbrella, with no lapse in the Total Customer Care support they have provided since 1983.

“We’re excited to begin our next chapter with Ascenda, being able to offer our customer’s access to leading technology, while also continuing to provide the local support we have for the past 40 years,” said Jim Shaver, Owner, ATI.

GO TO THE ASCENDA WEBSITE

 

About Ascenda

Ascenda™ is a globally recognized customer experience consulting agency for organizations of all sizes. Our speed of innovation ensures that businesses can transform how they work together with customers and employees while also exceeding key business metrics. Ascenda’s focus is to empower your business with customer experience technologies through solution engineering, superior implementation, and agile support. Since 1983 more than 4,000 companies in over 10 countries have trusted Ascenda to accelerate business outcomes through innovative processes and technologies.

About ATI

For 35+ years ATI has offered a full portfolio of services to transform how you design & deploy Unified Communications on-premise and in the cloud. We provide cradle to grave support for our clients through scalable platforms with streamlined migration paths thus delivering total investment protection for the life of your onsite or cloud solution.

 

About Third Generation

Based in Pittsburgh, PA and serving the greater Mid-Atlantic region and beyond, Third Generation brings innovation, intelligence, and deep industry experience together with leading technologies from our ecosystem of partners to help you re-invent your business as an intelligent enterprise.

From ATI

We are in 2021 folks. If you don’t know this already, we are in an era where we expect highly contextual and personalized experiences. Particularly in the goods and services we use every single day. This is the same in our personal and business consumption. Amazon, Netflix, Chick-Fil-A, and the trendy & exploding business in your backyard are perfect examples of this. Cancel culture doesn’t just happen in politics or in mainstream media. If we go through a less than ideal experience pre or post sale (personal or business), the chances of us going back are incredibly low. In fact, we’ve cancelled them (yes, that’s bit harsh but it’s true). A lack of customer appreciation within a business = lack of trust and confidence within a consumer. Today, consumers will immediately write that experience off and go somewhere else to find what they are looking for. Why? Because someone else down the road or online has a similar product /service and might just deliver a better and more highly contextual and personalized experience. In fact, consumers would rather risk going somewhere else down the physical or online street, than to go through that type of experience again. Consumers do this because we can. There is a cornucopia of options out there, so why settle… The result of the cancel culture, instant gratification, and experience driven consumers will continue to make or break your organization. Businesses that are not obsessed with CX (customer experience) will continue to lose customers to their EDB (Experience Drive Business) competitor until there are none left to give.


What is your customer retention ratio? What is your competitors? Where do you stand in the marketplace and how do your customers perceive you as a business? What keeps them coming back? What customer service problems do you always need to resolve? How is your technology aligning with your revenue goals? How are you enabling your employees to better serve clients? Do you measure your team and department satisfaction? The questions can go on, but the idea is simple, superior experiences drive business growth. This can only come from a true obsession focused on the customer experience. A recent study found that customer obsessed companies have “the highest median three-year growth in sales, the highest levels of customer satisfaction, and the highest levels of employee satisfaction”. An EDB (Experience Driven Business) will grow revenue 1.4x faster and have 1.6x the customer retention than a none EDB. Where do you want to be? How do you get there? Customer experience begins within the channels that you communicate and collaborate with clients (phone, text, chat, email, social media, etc..) and the back end applications, integrations, and data you use to enhance their time with you.



A few items to think about: How are you using data to better analyze your clients, to enhance their experience? How are you delivering customer service? Do you have a CRM? Do you have a contact center? Why not? How are the CRM, the Contact Center, home grown business solutions, and other mission critical apps connected? Are They? Are you leveraging “data dips” to streamline and enhance the customer journey? Are you tracking the customer journey? Are you bringing in your social channels (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn) to your contact center? Who manages your social networks? How are you collecting data to better understand your client base? Who are they? What makes them tick? Why do they buy from you?



The Customer Experience is absolutely everything today. If you are not obsessed with it, your competition is. We are your conduit to become an EDB. We focus on your people (customer & employee), your processes, and your technology. Our strategy, IP, consultative approach, and execution will undoubtedly bring you to where you need to be; delivering a highly contextual and personal experiences to your customer.

From ATI

If you don’t know this already…

It’s apparent that we are in an information overload and content/data abundant world. To a point that we cannot consume and understand it fast enough which has massively disrupted everything. The only constant in this world is change and it is happening faster than ever and beyond our ability to keep pace. The result, is the inability to clearly drive change, transform business via technology, secure the more than ever mobile workforce, and maintain the competitive edge over your competition. ATI is your clear path forward. An agency that maintains a pulse on marketplace trends, business transforming technologies, and delivers a process, strategy, and approach to ensure technology is consumed effectively as you navigate the disruption in a way that enhances business and your role as an IT leader. There’s a lot of mud in the water and there are more technology services and platforms than ever before that you have the option to consume. Which one is right for you? How do you evaluate one over the other? Has your buying process changed since the arrival of the cloud? It should have. What makes one solution better than the other? If only you had an “Amazon” or “Google” like platform which delivers real information, case studies, ACTUAL CUSTOMER reviews, data, marketplace trends, engineering resources, RFP’s, and more. Oh wait, you do ?

With that said, I believe that it is critical to maintain a cadence with clients to ensure you are educated, have the wherewithal to navigate disruption, and know who to lean on to develop the strategy, contract the technology appropriately, successfully implement, and ultimately consume.

What will this cadence look like? A bi weekly/monthly letter from myself showcasing clients that have successfully taken a step forward in their cloud journey, market trends, relevant/current events that are meaningful to you, and some questions to reflect on as you look internally within your current and future projects. Should I strike a chord or perhaps the information sent is relevant to a current evaluation or project, let’s connect. Our team is ready to partner and lean in with you on the next phase of your cloud journey.

ATI, your stable source for technology & knowledge in a world of disruption.

From ATI

Impartial arbitrators of knowledge, navigators of disruption. We link our known to your unknown. We anticipate what it will take to thrive.

From ATI

ATI is committed to providing our customers with valuable information that keeps them in front of new technology. We surveyed hundreds of CIO’s from several different industries, asking them about their current technology and future needs. We talked about everything from their technology assessment cycle to their disaster recovery plans.

What we’ve learned can help you align your business initiatives with the state of the industry. Below are some of the key insights we uncovered:

• It’s not a surprise that security assessments or improvements top the list of technology priorities in 2019. Also on the list are server migrations or cloud deployments as well as Office 365 or Exchange migration and management.
• Nearly 40% of customers surveyed need help designing their security plans, and less than half assess their breach plan annually.
• Roughly 25% of the customers surveyed indicated they were solely dependent on physical backup for their disaster recovery protocol.
• Contact Center Solutions are only being used by 6% of the end-users surveyed.

By listening to our customers, we can say with confidence that security and cloud migration possess the greatest avenues for growth. Together, we can help secure your success not just this year, but in the upcoming years as well.

To get a more in-depth look at the data we gathered from our customers, you can download the report here.

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