David Evans, VP Product Management, from GoTo, a SaaS company offering business communications and remote IT tools, discusses how has the pandemic changed UC, and what’s next for the UCC Sector.
Discussions about how doing business has changed over the last five years often revolve around one topic: remote working. With studies showing just 4% of UK employees logged on from home in 2019, and now only 9% of companies don’t offer hybrid options, it’s not hard to see why.
The way businesses have managed this transformation has triggered important shifts in the systems and processes leveraged to keep teams and customers connecting smoothly, and we can see this best demonstrated in how unified communications (UC) has evolved.
Amid soaring demand for versatile communication and collaboration, UC has leapfrogged to the top of the priority list, experiencing a near double jump in global market value since 2020 to over $85 billion. But the big question is, how exactly have practices changed between then and now, and what’s next?
Quick adaptation: the early remote rush
While not all early pandemic adjustments were knee-jerk reactions, it’s fair to say most responses centred on speed. Recognising the importance of UC to ensure minimal disruption and streamlined service, companies rapidly extended their toolkits — with the number of global employees using collaboration tools soaring by 44% globally from 2019 to 2021.
Often the fear of imminent business failure fuelled a tendency towards panic buying. Many firms set aside standard adoption protocols, meaning technologies were deployed without consideration of long-term value and security. At the same time, teams frequently installed their own tools, creating fragmented bundles of point solutions that needed to be stitched together and weren’t always interoperable.
Similar challenges led to mixed results when deploying artificial intelligence (AI). On the plus side, smart features such as automated transcripts and notes for video calls helped improve the efficiency and quality of remote meetings. Less positively, some hasty applications of first-wave conversational AI led to sub-par customer experiences, affecting perceptions of chatbots and sparking stronger desire for human support.
Inevitably, managing multi-faceted communications across employees in different locations also brought greater security risks. Where the earliest concerns were about fortifying virtual meetings against uninvited guests, organisations quickly identified the need for more robust ways to safeguard confidential customer and business data travelling between various endpoints.
Settled simplicity: all-in-one tech gains pace
The biggest difference in today’s UC approach is a move away from emergency-centric thinking. Instead of making ad hoc decisions, businesses are looking at the full communications picture to determine what best suits their needs.
This broader perspective is also driving a mindset shift about what good looks like. Demand for better future-proofing and reduced fragmentation has fuelled interest in single platforms that make it easy to coordinate and integrate multiple capabilities, in addition to simplifying legal and IT policy compliance. Those who have chosen their solutions wisely are also finding another huge benefit, unlocking new ways of delivering exceptional customer experiences.
The Contact Centre has long been seen as the custodian of the customer experience. Now, however, companies – especially small and multi-location firms — are realising that great experiences must be part of seamless, timely, and personalized service delivered by everyone across the business, and single platform solutions are the only way to deliver this effectively. The key challenge is telling truly cohesive offerings apart from platforms that are comprised of several disparate integrated products trying to achieve the same thing, which can pose serious challenges, not least for the consistent implementation of AI.
With more firms starting to recognise UC as vital for both internal and external connections, tech shopping lists have also expanded. Companies are looking for platforms that enable smooth transitions between channels and integrations with business applications, on top of providing actionable AI use cases and slick, intuitive interfaces that employees and customers enjoy using.
While AI innovations have added to security challenges, vendors are accelerating their efforts to tackle emerging problems and risks. In addition to enhancing hacking defences and allowing companies to apply carefully controlled access permissions, the more advanced provide zero trust models and end-to-end encryption.
Enhanced efficiency: the scalable future
The future will likely be dominated by comprehensive platforms that can integrate, automate, and personalize communications. As firms increasingly understand the drawbacks of piecemeal stacks – even when built on the same foundational base – a rising preference for truly unified UC will help curb complexity, cut implementation time, and increase operational consistency.
In terms of smart tech, the latest wave of AI is already delivering some incredibly powerful new capabilities. As tech sophistication continues to progress at dizzying speed, it will be important to ensure a balance between harnessing emerging innovations and persistent practical value.
Businesses must partner with vendors that understand their specific business challenges and are developing solutions that can grow with their future aspirations. Fortunately, more than ever UC solutions are tailoring themselves for specific business sizes or industries, so businesses can do their homework and find the perfect match. By taking care to prioritise platforms that offer genuinely easily usable and scalable tools, they will secure both an effective unified communications solution, and a partner that can move with them in a rapidly changing technology environment.
