Secure connectivity and the cloud have been core business needs for several years – and will remain so for the foreseeable future. Yet within connectivity, communication systems to meet future needs are changing – and rapidly.
When it comes to IT and communications, companies have had to come to terms with the harsh realities of the post-Covid workplace. The hybrid model will have to be adapted indefinitely and the so-called third workplace will be a top priority for many. This will have big ramifications on how IT teams must carry out their responsibilities and on the communications infrastructure that will form the foundation of their business.
With all the great technological changes that have taken place during the pandemic, networked resources have become most vital. Investing in cloud resources and modernizing user computing and experience management are necessary to achieve better alignment of IT and the business. With the continued demand for conferencing services, communication platforms, enterprise social networks and collaboration tools across all businesses, the total addressable market size of communication and collaboration products and services will continue at a reasonable pace.
Specifically, communication and collaboration software – comprising communication platforms and social networking and enterprise collaboration platforms – represents the fastest growing market segment. While proposals for traditional communication and collaboration services such as fixed voice, mobile voice services and audio-only conferencing services will see their business expenses decline given the widespread shift tounified communications (UC), web and video conferencing, managed IP telephony and mobile data services are expected to see healthy growth.
Cloud-based services
A key driver for the growth of this segment is the fact that most of the new platforms are cloud-based, which makes their deployment simple and on-demand, providing an agile communications infrastructure as a service.
Another key trend is occurring in the communications-as-a-service environment – the breaking down of traditional silos. Perhaps most notably, this is seen in the closer alignment, if not full integration, of Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) and Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS).
While traditional communications and collaboration service propositions such as fixed voice, mobile voice services, and audio-only conferencing services will see reduced business expenses, managed IP telephony and mobile data services are expected to experience a healthy growth
The former has traditionally centered around removing business latency, providing solutions for workers outside the office to stay in touch almost constantly. UCaaS has increasingly integrated video conferencing over the last couple of years or so, while CCaaS has really lived up to its tin, with the latest systems much more flexible in how they can be accessed. These once very distinct elements are now together.
This was exemplified in February 2022 when Zoom announced the launch of Zoom Contact Center, described as an omnichannel contact center solution optimized for video and offering the same experience as the main Zoom conferencing platform. The product was previously known as Zoom Video Engagement Center and combines unified communications and contact center capabilities with the familiar Zoom platform.
It supports customer service use cases and workflows using channels such as video and voice, along with SMS and web chat, and is considered by the company to be “powering the ‘future of communications’ beyond meetings with Unified Communications, Zoom Developer Platform, Zoom Events and now Zoom Contact Center.
Supporting over 100 contact center agent, supervisor and admin features at launch, the product has the ability to include additional channels, customer relationship management (CRM) and management integrations workforce, as well as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to optimize agent productivity. It is also designed to extend traditional capabilities that are typically optimized for voice to deliver a unique customer experience through channels such as video. This could mean enabling connected working from anywhere.
Cloud Call Centers
Zoom says its decision was based on understanding the importance of bringing unified communications and a multi-channel contact center together in the same experience.
A typical use case might see contact center agents, often tied to physical contact center locations and often still needing to navigate multiple communication tools to work effectively remotely, use Zoom Contact Center to streamline inefficiencies. by bringing communications together in a central hub and collaborating with peers, supervisors or other employees in Zoom Chat and channels. This could be done by providing customers with a rich agent experience, the company explains.
Blair Pleasant, Principal Analyst at BC Strategieswhich focuses on the enterprise communication products and services market, says the launch of Zoom shows it understands the importance of bringing together unified communications and the multi-channel contact center in the same experience.
“Zoom is known for its great videos, which is important for high-interaction customer scenarios and internal use cases such as IT help desk, employee helpline, and revenue-generating activities. “, she says. “But the fact that Zoom Contact Center supports the routing, additional channels, and agent functionality that organizations need means Zoom Contact Center could become the modern contact center solution of choice.”
“The passage [in working] putting our system under a stress test that we never thought we could do at the time [but] it was a new thing we had to adapt to / [We found] it is possible to do everything when everyone is mobilized and they all have the same objective”
Nidal Abou-Ltaif, Avaya International
The needs of call center agents have been transformed by Covid. Almost overnight, companies had to move entire teams from well-equipped offices to people’s homes or other non-office locations. Naturally, not all of these places had the technological stuff to be a call center agent. It was a challenge for the communications technology industry to meet, and quickly, leading to what was perhaps the industry’s largest proof of concept, involving millions of people using advanced communications to maintain businesses in operation.
Stress test passed
Nidal Abou-Ltaif, president of Avaya International, recalls feeling confident in the capability of his company’s collaboration infrastructure because it was fundamentally designed to support remote working.
“The passage [in working] putting our system through a stress test that we never thought we could do at the time,” he says. “We moved people to work from home, from anywhere. We had to work with many countries to scale up because a contact center agent can’t go to work from home and then have access to all of their customer data – so there were a lot of challenges behind the scenes.
“We had to realize it was a new thing that we had to adapt to and what we got out of it is what people call the art of the possible. It is really possible to do anything when everyone is mobilized and they all have the same objective.
And while technology products were an integral part of the solution to this new way of working, Abou-Ltaif says the key lay more in platform-as-a-service communications tailored to the new world of work, and that new platform and service approach. actually started some time before March 2020.
“I think we’re beyond the product,” he says. “That is, we moved on to what we realized we had actually been working on for some time. Again, Covid accelerated the proof that we had the right vision, by having a platform to enable things to change. Our platform enables people to do messaging, IVR [interactive voice response] and input, connect video, voice, email, chat and social media. All through apps or APIs [application programming interfaces]. I think we will continue to improve and secure our platform and allow things to come into it.
Abou-Ltaif adds: “We make sure to serve our customers according to their needs and choices. Some customers want to stay on price alone; they don’t want video. Some want it all. And we’re starting to see customers wanting to have it all.
“Airlines want their contact center to do everything possible – video chat or social media, not just the social media we are used to; they want to have WeChat, for example. Customers also now have the choice to demand what they want. One big change we’re starting to see is that customers want full communication. They want to go through virtual assistants that offer the same quality as when talking to someone. They want to have the video.
They say you can’t please everyone all the time, but there’s no doubt that the bar for customer satisfaction is rising higher and higher, especially in the new hybrid way of working. As many businesses have seen since the start of the pandemic, there has been a huge increase in demand for high-quality customer experience services, which has put increased pressure on businesses to respond. with more agility and at higher business speed.
Comprehensive, cloud-based, integrated UCaaS and CCaaS platforms can do much, if not entirely, to address future customer retention challenges and deliver richer experiences.
