The process of deploying unified communications and collaboration solutions transformed during the pandemic. That change brought forth an even greater amount of modification to how resellers operate and handle everyday customer tasks like onboarding and deployment.
Of course, many other considerations exist, others far beyond deployment and onboarding. There’s the service customers receive going-forward, billing, etc. And Iain Sinnott, Sales and Marketing Director, VanillaIP, said that resellers must think about a lot more if they want to reach success in a post-pandemic UC climate.
Since the market has undergone so much transformation over the past year, Sinnott said that resellers must think about their role in the market, how it’s changed, and how they will approach it. He noted that resellers must think of customers in post-Corona terms, and added that industries like travel WILL come back. So will the need to re-engage with other products, he contends. Further elaborating, Sinnott continued:
“The world was briefly seen through the lens of virtual meetings and remote working but we need to get back to focusing on customer experience now”
He believes this can happen with the help of back-office automation, telling me if you want to deliver real-time solutions and focus on CX, back-office automation is the way to go. “You can put more of an emphasis on interacting with customers the way they want to talk.” This includes leveraging the power of features like call recordings, Omni-channel contact options, and engagement statistics. “Automating manual and oftentimes repetitive tasks like billing, provisioning, and real-time deployment, also makes resellers more efficient in the end.”
Sinnott said this must all happen to accommodate a new kind of worker created by the pandemic. This is the employee who will want to work from home some of the time and in an office a part of the time. Their argument to management not considering WFH for the sake of productivity, “I worked from home during Corona because it was practical and productive – look at my last year of accomplishments.”
He believes that for training and development, some office time is necessary for the future. Resellers will, however, adapt, because this is where they thrived in a pre-pandemic world, according to Sinnott. “They’re taking what they once knew, adding it to what they learned, and applying that knowledge to build better solutions,” Sinnott said.
Business owners before the pandemic did not trust that working from home would yield the kind of productivity it did in an office. Sinnott said that 2020 should have more than returned this trust to executives around the world. Despite various working environments, given the proper tools, people can work from home quite efficiently, so resellers have to help them refine the process they have when selecting the tech that powers their organization.
Sinnott wants resellers to be more curious about the world of UC&C, noting, this frame of mind will ensure resellers are familiar with the strengths of the markets they serve and the vendors they have at their disposal so they can extend the best possible customer and end-user experience. Today customers seek flexible working, remote working, and collaboration spaces, all tested, tweaked, and adopted over the past year, Sinnott summarized.
