Chapter 1 The new corporate imperative.

Amid once-in-a-generation challenges, businesses last year pivoted quickly to enable remote work and sustain their ability to serve customers. Digital transformation was forced to the top of their corporate agenda. Out of necessity, many of these organizations made short-term, quick decisions to get through the times. Speed mattered.

The new year represents a new phase of Operate From Anywhere, where businesses apply the lessons they have learned to inform their long-term communications services plans. This includes evaluating new services such as business app integrations, extending cloud into their contact center, and embedding communications into websites and apps. For those businesses that didn’t move their communications to the cloud last year, there is a good chance that they are considering it now.

Driving this push goes beyond saving time and money. “Enterprises now see cloud communications as a critical component of employee enablement, customer connection and business continuity,” says Dave Sipes, 8x8 CEO. As a result, according to Gartner, “businesses will be forced to accelerate their digital transformation plans by at least five years through to 2024.”

Yet, organizations still have to support their remote employees. More than 42 percent of IT/telecom decision-maker respondents of a recent Frost & Sullivan study said more than half of their workforce will continue working from home on a part-time or full-time basis (Frost & Sullivan, Growth Opportunities in the North American UCaaS Market, January 2021).

Even though many organizations have begun moving their communications to the cloud, many more are still in the process of figuring out how it can work for them. And, they have lots of choices to get there.

8x8 does see a palpable push from customers for an open, unified platform approach. We are not the only ones. Look at how Microsoft is marketing Teams as a productivity hub that welcomes value-added integrations. The integrations not only make it possible to personalize applications, but also make it easier to introduce new technologies like artificial intelligence and advanced analytics into your stack.

Advocating for UCaaS or CCaaS on a unified cloud platform is not new. But API and other technology advancements are now enabling tighter integration among applications like chat, voice, and video. This is particularly true with voice solutions for office workers and contact center agents. In effect, the lines between UCaaS and CCaaS are blurring. And organizations want them both together from one provider.

Here are a few reasons why the distinctions between UCaaS and CCaaS are going away:

• Organizations want to map customer experiences across all interactions — a customer may begin an interaction with a front-line worker then transferred to a contact center agent then again to support personnel
• Video — Video use cases fit for both contact center as well as ecommerce and support. Because video is so increasingly popular for customer interactions, it must be seamless. You do not want one solution for your contact center and other for everything else
• Data lakes — common data storage repositories make it more efficient to run AI algorithms and process data analytics. The ability to store data in once place is another benefit of tight UCaaS and CCaaS integration

Unified communications and contact center technology integration yields measurable benefits including 9% more revenue and 8.8% more agent efficiency — this data represents responses from all 700 companies in the study. Companies that reported the best positive changes for cost reductions, revenue increases, customer ratings and agent efficiency were placed in a success group category. These 157 companies saw more positive outcomes including:

• 86.5% revenue increases (109% for midsize companies, 55% for large companies, 40.8% for small)
• 14% cost reductions (13% for midsize companies, 14% for large companies, 33.3% for small)
• 46.5% customer ratings improvements (48.3% for midsize companies, 24% for large companies, 78.3% for small)

Successful CX transformation projects use more video for customer interactions than unsuccessful projects — using video led to increased revenue (>20%), customer ratings (14%) and agent efficiency (8%)

The full results of Metrigy’s study will be available soon.

• Full Steam Ahead for Microsoft Teams — Teams’ rise will continue opening opportunities for customers to get premium voice and administrative capabilities via direct routing solutions.
• Edge Networking, 5G and Wi-Fi 6 — Networking innovations can enable improved QoS, traffic management that can lead to better voice/video quality.
• Unified Analytics — Organizations want insights about a customer’s complete journey and unified analytics deliver interaction data both from the contact center and other departments.
• AI Will Become Table Stakes — Customers are chomping at the bit to automate tasks and identify customer patterns that they could not previously obtain.
• Video’s Killer App Shifts from Conferencing to Programmable, Embedded Video — Companies want to use video to personalize customer experiences, reinvent commerce and customer support.
• EX Investments Improve CX — Companies will invest in employee experience more in areas such as training, which may be more difficult this year as hiring may come back and more training is delivered remotely.
• Business Continuity Plans are the New Norm for Contact Centers — The growing importance of the contact center to generate revenue and keep customers happy requires a dedicated team to protect data and employees.
• Customer Expectations Focus on Self-Service, Proactive Engagement — Customers want their needs taken care of quickly, providing self-service options allows human agents to devote more time to customers with complex questions.

Get a collection of essays on the top 2021 unified communications trends.

Operate From Anywhere: With 8x8’s open communications platform, it’s possible for organizations to:

• Unify communications and collaboration to create organic experiences across video, phone, messaging, chat, devices and teams for greater productivity
• Seamlessly embed communications and collaboration into every workflow, application and process
• Deliver engaging, personalized experiences through insights and organizational collaboration that includes the contact center

Learn more about the platform here.

• Have you evaluated your existing IT networking capabilities across your organization to determine if they will help or hinder you from meeting your communications performance expectations?
• Have you collaborated with your HR leaders to promote user adoption and adherence to workplace policies even when employees are working from home?
• Does your business continuity program include how employees can communicate and where they can communicate from when a disruption or disaster occurs?
• In planning, focus is often on end users or customer experience. Have you considered administrator needs and how easy a prospective communications system is to manage?
• Have you thought about different ways your communications solution can help you create new revenue streams? Embeddable video alone can open a world of possibilities.

Operate From Anywhere continues with organizations working to gain more business value from remote work programs and the administrative operations to manage them. As advanced analytics, AI and more business app integrations become available, more organizations are looking to run their communications and collaboration on a unified cloud platform.

In addition to cost savings, they want to use an integrated platform to deliver better customer experiences, gain competitive advantages and build in business continuity capabilities to be more resilient.

One of the interesting things to watch, as platform technology evolves, is blurring lines between applications. The need for separate applications for contact center and unified communications for office workers is going away.

Learn more about the 8x8 Open Commuication Platform

Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications as a Service, Worldwide, Gartner

Trends: Reducing Team Communications Silos for Better Worker ROI, Constellation Research

Businesses will spend more than $330bn on remote-working this year, Tech Republic

Growth Pipeline Diagnostic TM, Frost & Sullivan

2021: Trends to watch in Unified Communications and collaboration, Tim Banting

Bringing business communications, collaboration, contact center, and AI-assisted capabilities together, CX-focused leaders will win in the Operate From Anywhere environment of 2021. Read this chapter to learn how organizations will balance and meet customer expectations for agent assisted and self-service with a true team approach.