2021 sure through some more curveballs at everybody. What can we expect in the new year? What trends do we think will remain the same and what's going to change?
Collaboration and Productivity
It's now pretty safe to say; HYBRID AND REMOTE WORK ARE DEFINITELY HERE TO STAY.
Businesses in all industries are having to adapt and find ways to work in remote and hybrid settings. Various factors are forcing this to become our reality such as people not being able to attend in person meetings, due to illness, restrictions on travel, and government policies on group sizes.
Businesses will have to rely more heavily on their collaboration infrastructure and adapt to hosting this new style of meeting. Nearly every major manufacturer is creating a variety of devices that can help businesses achieve this transition smoothly.
Organizations have more choices than ever before when it comes to selecting hardware devices like webcams, video enabled conference screens, and microphone array systems. As well as the software choices that are ever expanding and continually adding new functionality, such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) to suppress background noise.
We think that 2022 will bring a plethora of new devices and solutions that will help accommodate remote and hybrid workers across all sectors.
Customer Experience
The importance of Customer Experience (CX) is now at the forefront of most companies' strategic planning. Consumers are expecting smoother, more reliable, and easier to access customer facing interactions than ever before. As witnessed at this year’s CES Keynote presentation, major players are valuing CX and the vast benefits that it brings to both consumers and organizations.
Organizations that implement a wise and smart CX strategy, are shown to have a much higher retention and return buyers than companies that don't follow the same principles.
We're excited this year to be expanding our offerings on AWS and their CX capable infrastructure that offers hundreds of different services including Amazon Connect, which is a cloud-based contact center.
Business Phone Systems
The shift to cloud-based phone systems is in full swing. The increased flexibility and feature rich options are appealing to companies of many sizes. Migrating to a platform like Avaya Cloud Office by RingCentral, Microsoft Teams or Zoom is now easier than ever. We are expecting more migrations to the cloud this year than ever before.
A large portion of hardware is reaching its end of life. Businesses need to decide to either keep their on-premise based phone system or migrate to a cloud based phone system. As we've seen from Avaya IP Office and Aura system updates, this might be the catalyst for some organizations to make the transition to the cloud, having an out-of-date phone system that is unable to be updated or add new users is a huge business risk.
We have many solutions to mitigate that risk, as well as a strategic plan, to implement business continuity solutions as fail safes and backups for your organization. We also now have short term month to month solutions as some organizations need a “band-aid” to hold them over for the short term while they decide what to do.
Conclusion
Follow us on social media, and subscribe to our newsletter to get the latest updates about technology in the collaboration. Remote working hybrid working and business phone system. We're looking forward to this year and expanding our solutions offering and continuing to provide our customers with the absolute best service and support in the industry.