(Editor's Note: This guest post was written for 8x8 by ZK Research Founder and Principal Analyst Zeus Kerravala.)

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a profound effect on the world. Businesses have compressed into months digitization plans that they had envisioned would take years. Employees who had been tied to one location can now work from anywhere (WFA), and that trend will persist for the foreseeable future. Results from the ZK Research 2022 Work-from-Anywhere Study show that while only 22% of employees regularly worked remotely before the pandemic, 51% will work from home two to four days per week, and another 14% will do so one day per week. This indicates that the future of work is hybrid and the majority of meetings will continue to have virtual participants.

As a result of the pandemic, businesses are seeing the largest change management activities of this generation and perhaps ever. Adding to the tectonic shift occurring in the workplace is the great resignation where employees are changing jobs at record levels. There is now an unprecedented amount of talent for businesses to hire, enabling companies of all sizes to create a much higher level and better performing workforce.

Collaboration tools play a key role in energizing the workforce and enabling customer facing employees to provide the highest levels of customer service. The rich unified communications capabilities enable employees to maintain digital proximity regardless of location. This helps facilitate team meetings and improves productivity, which are both critical components of hiring and retaining workers.

However, when it comes to choosing communications tools, there are a wide range of options. Some companies offer Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) for employee communications, Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) for customer facing interactions and Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS) for bespoke interactions. While there are a dizzying number of companies that offer one or two of the solutions, it’s critical to choose a communications provider that has a single cloud back end, such as 8x8’s XCaaS, that delivers all three capabilities. Only this can meet the demands of hybrid work.

Understanding why this is requires knowledge of how communications fits into the future of work. Historically, the communications needs of different workers were very discrete and siloed. Contact center agents used the phone and communicated only with customers. Salespeople dealt primarily with CRM data and used a phone and email. Today, that’s changed, and workers require the ability to communicate seamlessly, using a range of applications from back office and front office and this requires unified communications delivered from the cloud.

The platform must be built on CPaaS, which can be thought of as a set of building blocks or a “communications operating system” which delivers a complete set of collaboration tools such as calling, video, meetings, chat and more. The platform must be built on cloud native technologies like containers and microservices to enable the service provider to quickly add new capabilities. Future collaboration tools may include virtual or augmented reality, the metaverse or something not created. The key is that the capabilities can be added quickly, without disruption to the service providers' customers.

The service provider can use the rich platform capabilities to build a unified communications client, for employees to communicate with one another and a contact center application for customer facing individuals to interact with customers. This can be particularly useful for workers that need the ability to communicate internally and with customers. As an example, a customer success individual could reach out to another employee using chat while on the phone with a customer that was struggling to understand a product or service from the company. With two separate services, this would create a disjointed workflow where information had to be cut and pasted or copied between the systems. With point products, the worker must be the integration point for the data, which can lead to large amounts of human latency. With a unified platform, the system integrates the information for the worker.

In addition to standard unified communications and contact center applications, the service provider can create additional applications that meet the needs of certain worker types. 8x8’s Frontdesk is an excellent example as it is designed specifically for receptionists. While unified communications and contact centers are great for knowledge workers and agents, respectively, they are not optimal for all worker types. This is the power of CPaaS as it enables the service provider to create a front end for a wide range of other workers including sales, field service or other.

However, it’s unrealistic that the cloud communications provider will build an application for every worker in every industry. This is where cloud based APIs, SDKs and low code / no code platform can enable businesses or even independent software vendors (ISVs) to create custom applications for specific use cases. For example, an insurance company might have a unique workflow for its field service agents which would require only a handful of capabilities when compared to the rich capabilities of unified communications. The business could use the low code front end to create a bespoke experience giving the worker only the functions required and no more, simplified the experience. Incorporating professional front end development services can ensure these custom applications are user-friendly and efficient.

Looking ahead, much of the innovation in communications will be in analytics and artificial intelligence. In data sciences, there is an axiom that states “good data leads to good insights” and that is certainly true. But so is the statement that “silos of data lead to partial insights” and customers that use point products for CPaaS, UCaaS and CCaaS will have three discrete sets of data with which analytics will be performed. This would cause the business to miss out on key insights that could help transform the business. Companies that use a single service provider for all of their communications capabilities will gain a competitive edge over those that do not as they will be able to apply artificial intelligence-based analytics to any kind of interaction.

The pandemic caused companies to react to survive and this led to businesses using three, four, even five or more communications tools. It’s common to have one for calling, another for meetings, a third for contact center and a fourth for CPaaS. It’s now time to step back and evaluate service providers on their platform capabilities and their ability to deliver any kind of communications experience from a single cloud. This is critical in enabling workers to operate in a hybrid mode, which requires consistency of experience regardless of worker type of location.