As the world makes it's more permanent shift to hybrid working, businesses will have to consider the applications and tools they use when promoting collaboration. In...
This year, it seems that a substantial part of the global workforce will continue to work from home permanently. In this piece, Peter Quinlan, VP - Business Collaboration, Tata Communications, explores how remote collaboration capabilities can be improved and what the future looks like for these technologies.
With many employees now accustomed - indeed resigned – to working from home due to the ordeal that was 2020, it’s a good time to take stock of how business collaboration has risen to the challenge of widescale working from home.
And with dust from the initial mass exodus settling, organisations are taking a hard look at how remote collaboration capabilities can be improved. So, what are some immediate steps they can take, and what are the new collaboration technologies that will likely emerge in the next few years? Rethinking employee experience The IP-PBX in each office may be taking an early retirement, and users are now using UCC soft clients and the internet, or their mobile phones, to make calls, but a surprising number of workers still have under-utilised, old-school PSTN numbers. As mentioned, after the initial move to work-from-home, organisations took active steps to ensure their users joined meetings over IP to minimise toll charges. The next step will be to recognise that users just need a soft client, a data connection and a mobile number, and to retire the old phone numbers."Remote or mobile workers are now the rule, not the exception, driving massive change in requirements for office facilities, networks, security and processes."

And we can probably expect many of the cloud providers now offering UCC services with traditional telephony to start offering mobile numbers and data subscriptions, creating new alternatives to traditional mobile plans. While it does mean a re-think of existing processes, security, and management, there are significant cost, productivity, and user experience benefits to be captured. Rethinking customer experience Challenging as overhauling employee experience may seem, it may be the easy part of adapting to the new world order. Even before the pandemic, customers had already begun migrating to services that offered them a compelling digital experience. With offices, retail stores, and many public spaces closed or inaccessible, a digital customer experience delivered over a smart phone is no longer just an option, but often the only opportunity to engage. More rapidly than most expected, the digital engagement model has become the brand. This is forcing organisations in every industry to completely re-design the way they engage with customers. We’re seeing contact centres fully embrace an omni-channel experience across chat, voice, video, co-browsing, shared content and other media, healthcare is moving to tele-medicine wherever possible, and retailers are rapidly trying to recreate in-store experiences in a virtual world. The organisations that most effectively leverage collaboration technologies, automation, artificial intelligence and machine learning to deliver the most compelling – and most customised - user experience will be the ones to survive and thrive."There are immediate steps that can be taken now to optimise a digital employee experience in the “new normal”, and there will be further opportunities with the rollout of 5G over the next few years."
Fortunately, there are partners like Tata Communications who can provide assistance, and many of the necessary tools and services are available from the cloud, that can support that approach without requiring a large up-front investment. It is early days for most industries, but with entire sectors being disrupted by the pandemic and societies being rapidly re-shaped, the stakes could not be higher. The new normal The author William Gibson has said, “The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed.” Many organisations are finding that the pandemic has delivered the future to the front door and it is banging to get in. The technologies that can re-shape how we work, shop, and live are already here, but implementing them is no longer an option, or something we can phase in over time."With no roadmap, and little prior experience to guide them, it is critical that they adopt an agile approach, co-creating with customer input on a small scale to find out what works, and then constantly improving the model as it scales."

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