LogMeIn Boosts Its GoTo Online Meeting and Communications Services

LogMeIn has fleshed out its GoTo online meeting and communications services with the addition of a contact center option and Microsoft Teams integration.

This week’s enhancements, among others this month, come as demand for online meeting and communications services surge to support those working or attending classes from home because of COVID-19.

LogMeIn’s Mark Strassman

GoToMeeting and GoToConnect users can initiate online conferences or calls from Microsoft Teams with a module now available from LogMeIn’s recently launched GoTo Marketplace or Microsoft’s AppSource. “It creates an environment where the GoToMeeting app becomes part of the Microsoft Teams app, which is really convenient,” said LogMeIn Senior Vice President Mark Strassman.

LogMeIn is also bolstering GoToMeeting and GoToConnect as customers seek more secure and reliable alternatives to Zoom. To meet the spike in usage, LogMeIn has added memory and network capacity. The company has also enhanced audio delivery with added noise suppression and reduced delay. The company said the enhancements are designed to ensure improved performance when users have poor network access.

Similar to Zoom, Microsoft and Cisco Webex, LogMeIn is experiencing a sharp rise in usage of its online meeting and communications services, according to Strassman. “Our business is absolutely booming, which we couldn’t be more excited about,” Strassman said.

Some of the increased interest is also coming from customers and partners concerned about security weaknesses in the Zoom meeting service, leading some organizations to ban its use. “We’ve seen a lot of customers come to us, focusing on our history with security and our uptime,” Strassman said.

Among added security improvements, GoTo users can control what content they share and with whom. Strassman emphasized GoTo’s security, which requires passwords to enter meetings. The service includes AES 256-bit encryption, SOC2 and SOC3 data centers, Rich Based Authentication (RBA) and HIPAA compliance.

“It’s constantly a trade-off with video and meeting solutions — do you offer something that’s easier to use or do you add a couple steps to have it more secure? Strassman said. “It’s a fine line, but we’ve always focused on security first and continue to do that.”

CirQlive’s Dov Friedman

Dov Friedman, founder and vice president business development at CirQlive, which provides online meeting and communications services to K-12 schools and universities, is among those partners who have fielded requests to find alternatives to Zoom. “Since all of this has come out about Zoom, some of our customers are starting to look into other platforms like LogMeIn and Webex,” Friedman said. “It’s a big problem.

In addition to GoTo and Webex, CirQlive offers online meeting and communications services from Zoom and BlueJeans, through its Media Enhanced Education & Training Suite (MEETS). Besides conferencing, CirQlive integrates key learning management systems (LMSs) with MEETS.

Demand among CirQlive customers for GoTo services has accelerated over the past year, since LogMeIn launched GoToConnect, Friedman said.

LogMeIn developed GoToConnect to advance its Jive voice over IP telephony offering with GoToMeeting’s key online meeting and communications services. The launch of GoToConnect Support Center on Wednesday is an option for those who need to add basic contact center functionality. Partners can deploy it for customers in a day or less, according to Strassman.

GoToConnect Support Center lets employees field calls from home or on mobile devices. It’s an optional feature for customers with GoToConnect.

It lets managers create and update agent assignments. Managers can also access real-time information from the GoToConnect dashboard, which displays activities of agents, such as talk time and availability. Agents can login and logout of assigned queues with one button. They can view calling queues that displays caller ID, how long the callers waited on hold.

“This is a contact center offering for people who don’t have a big warehouse with thousands of people on the phone,” Strassman said. “And that’s especially relevant today where most contact center employees are actually now working from home. They don’t have to be in a central place. It can be deployed in a very distributed way. People can use it in the office, at home over a normal phone or on a mobile device.”

GoToConnect Support Center is currently available in the United States, the U.K., Germany, Ireland, Australia, Brazil and Mexico with rollout in other countries planned during the coming months. It…

… costs an extra $29.95 per month but LogMeIn is offering it free through June 30.

Nemertes’s Irwin Lazar

Adding a call center as a service (CCaaS) option to GoToConnect makes it a more viable competitor with 8×8, Ring Central and Vonage, among other cloud PBX providers, according to Irwin Lazar, vice president and digital workplace research leader at Nemertes.

“LogMeIn has done a good job of building out a competitive UCaaS offering based on its integration of GoToMeeting and Jive, and development of additional capabilities like team collaboration,” Lazar said. “CCaaS is also increasingly a core requirement for UCaaS success with most of LogMeIn’s competitors either having their own CCaaS or integrating CCaaS from a partner.”

While there’s no shortage of CCaaS providers, LogMeIn’s Strassman said many customers still don’t have any contact center functionality, especially small organizations. Strassman said only 13% of organizations have a customer support option to their communications system. Yet only 93% of customer interactions still take place by phone, according to Strassman. “What we’re launching here is a contact center offering for the other 87%,” he said. “Our new support center offers visibility that businesses need to improve how they engage with their customers in a really affordable way.”