From looking at trends for the UC and collaboration industry in 2023 to new call routing settings, here are some extracts from popular news stories this week.

Amazon Layoff Hike to 18,000 Exceeds Expectations

E-commerce giant Amazon has announced this week it will not be laying off 10,000 staff as first reported in November, but 18,000.

The cuts represent an 80 per cent increase on the forecast reported in the Wall Street Journal, amounting to about 1.2% of its worldwide workforce of around 1.5 million.

In a statement shared with Amazon employees this week, Andy Jassy, CEO at Amazon, confirmed the losses; he said: “Today, I wanted to share the outcome of these further reviews, which is the difficult decision to eliminate additional roles. Between the reductions we made in November and the ones we’re sharing today, we plan to eliminate just over 18,000 roles.”

The cuts will affect around 5% of the corporate workforce. About what divisions would be most affected, Jassy stated:

“Several teams are impacted; however, most role eliminations are in our Amazon Stores and PXT organisations.”

As shopper demand appears to have slowed while inflation rates have climbed steadily higher, Amazon is not the only tech firm to cut costs across divisions.

‘Businesses Need to Boost Hybrid Working’ Following UK Strikes – GoTo

Remote work has become a business imperative, and people need to be able to work from anywhere, according to Paul Carolan, AVP of Sales EMEA, GoTo.

Carolan made the comments on what was dubbed in the UK media as ‘Tragic Thursday’ due to an estimated 10 per cent of trains running across the country.

The lack of running trains was caused by ongoing strike action within the UK’s rail industry, meaning millions of commuters struggled to get to work.

As a result, GoTo states that businesses must provide IT support to boost hybrid working within their organisations.

Carolan commented:

“The cost-of-living crisis, economic volatility, and ongoing train strike action all go to show just how unpredictable the world can be.

“To accommodate this, remote work has become a business imperative: people need to be able to work from anywhere.

“However, while the flexibility of remote and hybrid work models offers a range of benefits, it does also pose some new challenges.

“For instance, employees scattered around the country and even the world can no longer swing by the IT desk when they encounter a technology problem.

“This can cause delays in business operations which ultimately impacts the bottom line.”

GoTo says that because of the likelihood of future industrial action, businesses will need to prepare their IT departments to help remote employees should they have any technical problems.

Microsoft to Add a New Call Setting to Teams

Microsoft is introducing a new way of managing incoming calls when a user is already busy with an existing call or meeting.

According to the Microsoft 365 roadmap, the feature will be called ‘busy-on-busy’.

The new setting will allow Teams users to decide whether calls can come through, play a busy signal, or redirect the call based on their unanswered call routing preference.

The roadmap post states: “Manage how incoming calls are routed when you are busy in an existing call or meeting directly from your Calls settings in the Teams app.

“Choose from the option to allow calls to come through, play a busy signal, or redirect the call based on your unanswered call routing preference.”

The busy-on-busy setting will be available to Microsoft Teams users on the desktop client and Mac devices.

Microsoft states that the setting will be generally available to users in February and coincides with several new features scheduled to come to the platform next month.

The first is a new Teams licence called Microsoft Teams Premium, which will provide admins and end users with extra features on top of their current Teams subscription.

‘Businesses will be laser-focused on making collaboration easy’ in 2023 – RingCentral

The further development of AI, a zero-trust approach to security, and the simplification of collaboration from anywhere are all things we will see in 2023, according to Louise Newbury-Smith, Country Manager for UK and Ireland, RingCentral.

Newbury-Smith has outlined key trends that she believes we will see throughout the year in the unified communications and collaboration industry.

It follows from a report published by RingCentral towards the end of 2022 that highlights that “phones will still be a primary business communication tool” in 2023.

AI Will Make the Workplace Smarter

RingCentral predicts that AI will continue to develop and streamline workflows throughout 2023 as it makes the workplace smarter.

The company is making the prediction on the back of Gartner stating that conversational AI will reduce contact centre agent labour costs by $80bn and projects that one in 10 agent interactions will be automated by 2026.

Salesforce to Cut 10% of Workers in New Year Slowdown

San Francisco-based software firm Salesforce has announced it will lay off around 10 per cent of its workforce in the coming weeks.

The job losses mean the company’s global workforce of around 79,000 would decrease by about 7,900 staff.

In an email to staff, Co-CEO and Co-Founder Mark Benioff explained:

“As our revenue accelerated through the pandemic, we hired too many people leading into this economic downturn we’re now facing, and I take responsibility for that.”

In the past two years, Salesforce has seen an increase in hiring, mainly due to the rise in digital services brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2021 it added around 17,000 staff and by the autumn of 2022 had 6,500 more.

Benioff, who co-founded Salesforce in 1999, spoke about what would happen for US employees released from their contract; he stated: “For those who will be leaving Salesforce, our priority is to fully support them, including by offering a generous package. In the U.S., affected employees will receive a minimum of nearly five months of pay, health insurance, career resources, and other benefits to help with their transition.”

Referring to the firm in general, Benioff outlined his reasons for the cuts: “We have never been more mission-critical to our customers. We have an unparalleled ecosystem, with thousands of partners and millions of Trailblazers building their companies on our platform.

“However, the environment remains challenging, and our customers are taking a more measured approach to purchasing decisions. With this in mind, we’ve made the very difficult decision to reduce our workforce by about 10 per cent, mostly over the coming weeks.”

The announcements come in a week when other tech giants, Amazon, Vimeo, Meta and Microsoft, have revealed plans to make substantial cuts.

 

 



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