It’s set to be another eventful year in the unified communications and customer experience industries, with move to hybrid work driving adoption of new technology. 

UC Today sat down with Blair Ferguson, Chief of Staff at ComputerTalk, to discuss the trends she expects to emerge in 2022. 

Security Will Test Vendors and Customers

The move to remote working, and now hybrid working, has put strain on both IT teams and IT providers in a number of ways. 

Perhaps the most crucial issue to address is security, particularly with workforces more dispersed than ever before. 

Ferguson said that challenges with security will continue across the board, explaining that many businesses are struggling to adapt to the characteristics of cloud-based protection.  

“As people look to replace legacy investments, they are expecting to have the same security protocols in the cloud as they had on premises,” she explained. 

“One of the challenges of cloud security is a sense of loss of control because now you’re relying on your cloud vendors to do it for you, where you would have previously turned to your own IT departments”  

From a vendor perspective, Ferguson said that customers are paying greater attention to a potential supplier’s security credentials, which can slow down buying processes. 

“Vendors are required to have enhanced security certifications such as ISO, SOC 2 and PCI,” she said. “Those are becoming the bare minimum. 

“When we’re responding to RFPs and trying to provide solutions to our clients there is a need to go through very detailed enhanced security audits as part of the procurement process. This has a tendency to delay the buying process and we suspect that will continue.” 

Teams Will Continue to Disrupt

The rapid adoption of Teams over the past two years is undeniable, with the most recent figures from Microsoft showing that the platform has 240 million monthly active users. 

Ferguson said that many of ComputerTalk’s contact centre clients were reluctant to bring Teams into their solution at first, but now some 95 percent of customers are using Teams in some capacity – primarily for chat and then potentially adding in voice. 

She said that businesses are now exploring how they can connect Teams to specialised contact centre solutions. 

“The way that we have integrated our solution in Teams allows us to leverage a lot of the media processes in the platform, and then extend it with the enterprise contact centre functionalities within ice,” she said. 

“I’d now say that 95 percent of the companies we work with have Teams as some component of their journey, so being able to expand on that investment and add contact centre capabilities on top of their UC platform is important. 

“So, I think we’re going to see more voice in Teams over the next 12 months; I think organisations are going to replace old PBXs with Direct Routing and Operator Connect, and by default, the contact centre often gets pulled along into those discussions.” 

Employee Experience Will Rule

Ferguson said that employee experience is being acknowledged as critical by businesses across the world – not least in the contact centre industry, where happy agents are more likely to deliver a stronger service. 

“If you can provide your agents with an easy to use, all-in-one platform, they’re going to be happier, their job will be easier and they’ll naturally be able to provide a better service to clients,” she explained. 

“For example, this could be a single pane of glass that lets them provide the full stack of support to clients that are either calling or emailing, because they won’t have to click between different user interfaces. 

“This is where our platform fits well because we can leverage the Teams interface by plugging in our agent experience, so they can live and breathe within the interface they’re used to using” 

Alongside this, Ferguson expects the growth in digital customer experience channels to continue – with customers now wanting to engage with the companies they buy from over chat and social media. 

That said, she still considers voice to be the number one option for customers at the moment.  

“Even though we’re seeing an increase in digital channels, voice is still the leading modality for connectivity into the contact centre,” she said. 

AI Will Become More Accessible

Finally, Ferguson said that she expects adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) to continue to accelerate this year – particularly around transcription and sentiment analysis. 

She said that AI is now being discussed in all RFPs with customers and is started to be moulded into complete packages that can be tailored for specific verticals. 

“We’re at the point with AI where we’re finally doing it; it’s popping up in every RFP and there are conversations around automating the front-end experience for customers,” Ferguson explained. 

 “We’re seeing it pop up in a very packaged fashion. We package applications that identify business challenges upfront for various industries and tweak them to align with the company’s outlook.  

“The packaged applications are a starting point for a custom solution. This approach is effective at speeding up deployment. These solutions include chatbots and natural language recognition, so we can tell if a customer is annoyed, is a VIP customer, or has been satisfied through self-service for example.   

“I think we’ll see organisations implement those AI solutions and have a bit of a learning curve to see what it can do. Applying analytics like transcription, sentiment analysis, and intent classification will suggest key changes to business processes.” 

 

 



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