In my last article, I talked about the consolidation of UCaaS and CCaaS and how iTelecom can help you capitalize on both UCaaS and CCaaS to deliver superior customer experiences while lowering your costs. Here’s a look at three other trends shaping the UC and UCaaS landscape.
Employees Driving the Conversation
Successful businesses are listening and collaborating with their employees, and employees’ needs are dictating the technologies in which their employers invest. Business leaders understand the importance of leveraging technologies that help all employees to perform at their best. One of the best ways to do that is with process management, automation, and communication platforms.
Implementing asynchronous communication tools is one of the key trends emerging from this shift to employee-centric decision-making. With employees working in different locations, in different time zones, and on different schedules, asynchronous communication is powerful in providing people the flexibility to take in information on their own terms. It also leaves behind a digital paper trail of discussions, decisions, and actions that help to keep teams aligned and focused. Asynchronous features such as chat and messaging are standard. I expect that future solutions will include visual aspects captured from a meeting like a person’s face and gestures and visual content like a presentation.
Bring Your Own Carrier
BYOC (Bring Your Own Carrier) refers to programs that give you the ability to choose a carrier that best fits your business needs and plug them into your UC or UCaaS solution.
When UCaaS first started to roll out, UCaaS providers required companies to use their native public switched telephone network (PSTN) or select from a list of partners. Porting hundreds to thousands of numbers would be a big project for larger businesses. Additionally, large companies had negotiated attractive long-term contracts with carriers, putting them in a situation where migrating to UCaaS would not be cost-effective.
The introduction of BYOC made UCaaS a more attractive option for large enterprises. BYOC enables organizations to separate call control from their UCaaS platform and maintain legacy infrastructure and existing carrier contracts. BYOC will continue to be part of the UC offering because it allows greater control over call routing, superior voice quality, expanded global coverage, and potential cost savings.
Always On
Customers have been demanding quicker responses, and they expect customer contact centers to be available 24/7. Those who refuse to offer round-the-clock support will fall behind as customer experience becomes the key differentiator for businesses. Experts predict that customer experience will rival and overtake both product and price.
Therefore, companies will continue to invest heavily in customer experiences to ensure that customer contact is always available for both quick questions and more complicated inquiries. Seamless omnichannel experiences that feel continuous, even across multiple devices, apps, and operating systems, will increase employee and customer satisfaction as systems become more user-friendly, easier to navigate, and more empowering to the agents and customers who use them.
Want to learn more? Reach out to me today.
