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Top 6 Communications Services Trends of 2015 – Midyear Review

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In October 2014, we assembled a team of five service experts led by Mike Runda, Senior Vice President and President, Avaya Client Services, and asked them to predict services-related technology trends likely to emerge in 2015. Mike and the team came up with six key communications services trends.

Now, halfway through 2015, we’re taking a look back at those predictions to see where we’ve been and, most importantly, where we’re going.

Check out which trends are emerging, which trends have reached a key inflection point, and which are the most (positively) disruptive:

#1: The cloud takes shape.

Prediction: “The market is about five calendar quarters into an eight-quarter transformation, from a mindset that favored on premise, owned equipment, to one where executives think of cloud solutions first as they consider new and upgraded communications capabilities. The hosted cloud solution will need to drive a differentiated support services experience in which users can click from within the application to get timely help.”

Emerging:  While medium- to midsize businesses continue trending to public cloud and large enterprises continue to migrate to private cloud, the challenge for IT directors is dealing with a situation that has taken a 180-degree turn.

Two years ago, CEOs and CIOs were asking the question, “Why would we go to the cloud?” Those same CEOs and CIOs today manage their photos through iCloud and access team calendars through apps like Google Docs. Now more comfortable with the cloud, they’re asking, “Why not go cloud at the start?”

The answer is security. Although the typically lower-priced opex (often deployed as a subscription-based cloud service) model plays well with the CIOs and CFOs in the C-suite, cybersecurity concerns have led many decision-makers to take a step back and consider private cloud or hybrid solutions as the starting point.

Intrusions into corporate databases at Target, Sony, Home Depot and, just recently, the hacking of 22.1 million Federal employee records have led companies to think twice. Security issues, which have always been part of the cloud debate, are now center stage.

#2: Video support reaches an inflection point — if you snooze, you lose.

Prediction: “At the end of 2013, Amazon.com became the first company to offer one-way video customer support. In 2014, Avaya became the first company to offer both one-way and two-way video support options for customer engagement. Now, companies in many industry verticals are adopting—or at least piloting—some form of video. Businesses that haven’t begun to make the move to video will be challenged to catch up with their competitors.”

Key Inflection Point:  There is now enough data to prove that leveraging video improves interactions over phone, Web, text or any other form of special communications. Adding video to support provides a broader, more enriched experience.

Video is the only communication medium that enables support engineers to see the problem, rather than having it described to them. Many companies are choosing two-way video first because of the reward of quick resolution time. By no longer talking to a handset and instead talking “face-to-face” with a person, customers feel like they’re maximizing their service agreements.

#3: As omnichannel support matures, Web chat plays a pivotal role.

Prediction: “Even as video gains momentum as a high-touch channel (see Trend #2), companies will continue to use Web chat as the relatively low-expense way to initiate the customer experience from a website, to triage that experience, and to direct customers to the appropriate support channel and other support resources and tools.”

Emerging:  The emergence of Millennials in the workforce, and their preference for text-based communication, is leading to chat growth. This growth is only hastened by the benefits for employers. Since support engineers can handle multiple interactions at a time via chat, it’s an incredibly efficient medium.

While chat is pivotal to a well-rounded support strategy, the emphasis remains on empowering consumers to choose their method of communication. An award-winning dynamic network that offers many forms of communication, including chat, has led to quicker resolutions and more importantly, increased customer satisfaction scores for Avaya.

#4: Social media and crowdsourcing: Are you really engaging your customers?

Prediction: “It will be imperative to bridge the gap between simply monitoring social platforms for conversations about your company and doing something about them — i.e., capturing, routing and responding to those conversations within your contact center and/or broader enterprise, as well as encouraging customer-employee interaction through crowdsourcing, which is often carried out in private forums.”

Emerging: Online conversations are increasingly spreading out beyond the familiar boundaries of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Customer engagement tools not only help identify the conversation occurring in real-time, but offer up tools to respond, if needed. People, particularly Millennials, inherently trust the opinions of their friends, other consumers and brands (and probably in that order). Smart companies are offering tools to help users become experts and share their expertise. A great example are private forums where users are given a trust rating; information is rated on accuracy, and knowledge is shared among a technical community of interest.

#5: Support services transparency: Customers like what they see.

Prediction: “Mobility will be a growing factor, contributing to more seamless and transparent interactions that give customers instant access to rich information about their relationship with your company, your company’s products and services, and support tools and status.”

Positively Disruptive:  The rise of cloud and support services provides more transparency for enterprises and businesses into the support services they’ve been leveraging. Analytics show companies the number of incidents that may have occurred in their organization, support provider performance, and reveals how their hardware and software footprint is handling traffic. Leveraging this insight is increasing the need for IT departments to enhance their supplier management skills.

#6: The high-accountability support model emerges.

Prediction: “Individual support personnel will retain ownership of the customer experience and use techniques such as collaboration and ‘swarming’ to break down the barriers of the traditional “tiered” support organization. This approach will drive a better experience for customers and ultimately make for more efficient resource utilization in support organizations.”

Emerging:  This model can lead to reductions in incident resolution time and cost-per-incident, as well as improve customer and employee satisfaction scores, but the transformation to the high accountability model does require effort, as detailed in a recent blog outlining the implementation of four key steps .

Which trends are impacting your businesses? Are there trends that we missed? What trends do you see emerging in 2016 and beyond?

Follow me on Twitter @pat_patterson_v

 


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