"Our goal? Connecting people!"
Interview with Johannes Marschner, Managing Director of UNICOPE GmbH
Nothing is as flexible as a mobile phone – yet in a corporate context, landlines continue to offer many advantages. The communications service provider UNICOPE will now offer its mobile landline solution to all business customers in Germany following a successful market launch in Austria.
Wirtschaftsforum: Mr. Marschner, whether in the office, at home or by a remote lakeshore – with your mobile landline you always ensure a reliable connection. What are the main advantages of this solution?
Johannes Marschner: Our fundamental goal is to combine the best of two worlds – traditional landline and mobile communications. Despite all the innovations in mobile telephony, landlines still offer many advantages in terms of technical functionality that are important in a business context: These include features such as call handling, call groups, and Interactive Voice Response. The big disadvantage: unfortunately, you cannot take a landline with you – because in terms of flexibility, the mobile phone is obviously unbeatable. With VoIP telephony, we now want to provide our customers with a mobile landline that is based on a universally available technology and can therefore be used independently of location: in the home office, at a field appointment, or even at the lake.
Wirtschaftsforum: What pain points of your customers can you solve with this approach?
Johannes Marschner: A few years ago, we integrated mobile communications even more into our solution than before by offering calls not only via our mobile smartphone app but also via classic LTE connections. This allowed us to implement a true one-number concept that also ensures good call quality in very remote regions. Likewise, the conversation alignment enables efficient management of calls: other network participants can see that a user is on the phone and refrain from disturbing them with further calls. Although our world is becoming ever faster-paced, one can still only focus on one conversation at a time - or perhaps at most two if one is a dispatcher. At the same time, a consistent external appearance is ensured for the company in respective drop-off scenarios: if the desired contact is not available, the secretary can take the call, preventing it from ending up in an annoying voicemail or lost in data limbo.
Wirtschaftsforum: Five years ago, when the entire office infrastructure had to be made fit for home office overnight, did this also present new challenges in telephony for many companies - a boom time for UNICOPE?
Johannes Marschner: In the initial phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, most companies primarily looked for quick 'makeshift solutions' from their existing providers and truly did not have enough bandwidth to reconfigure their telephony comprehensively overnight - which was absolutely understandable. Later on, many businesses started to more thoroughly examine their communication options and often found that these no longer met their current needs. At this point, we came into play quite frequently.
Wirtschaftsforum: What technological advancements do you expect in the coming years?
Johannes Marschner: We are already heavily researching various AI approaches to prospectively expand our existing solutions. For instance, we are working on a professional AI-assisted operator that ideally connects callers directly to the right clerk through a natural language engine. Moreover, it's conceivable that AI could automatically summarize conversations in text form - for appointment notes or as a basis for subsequent meetings. But beyond artificial intelligence, UNICOPE has ambitious goals: for example, we plan to launch our onephone product in Germany in 2026, having already signed a mobile contract with a German provider.
Wirtschaftsforum: How would you describe the overarching vision that your company wants to pursue today and in the future?
Johannes Marschner: We want to make life easier for our customers and the end consumers: because with our solution, not only can the company we support rely on a stable solution, but at the same time, consumers can enjoy better service. Our goal is clear: we want to connect people - and let technology take care of the way between them.
Wirtschaftsforum: How do you gain your customers' trust?
Johannes Marschner: We consistently work with other Austrian manufacturers and developers and offer a European solution that covers all legal requirements from the GDPR to NIS2 accordingly. Therefore, I can tell my clients: "If you want to know exactly where your data is stored, I'll take you to the data center and show you the servers." Especially in times when cyber resilience is a top priority at almost every company, this presents a solid argument.