After the remote-working revolution of 2020, with WFH the “now normal”, UC has proliferated. Many organisations flocked to the big names, but buying an off-the-shelf solution is like driving a courtesy car; sure it gets you from A to B, but it will never be yours. With a more bespoke provider, you can personalise your experience. But where to start?
The irony is, for your UC solution to deliver big, you need to go small. Change the language, de-corporatise, and follow these five steps for better, nimbler, cost-effective comms.
1 - Your strategic suppliers' roadmaps may not enable UC for your business workflows
You might think of vendor proliferation as the last thing you want to do, but you need at least one more. Task them with knitting together your existing, telephony-centric solutions while expanding services and improving the user experience. The big UC vendors are often guilty of presenting their solutions as more complete than they really are. Witness the uproar around Microsoft Teams’ native PBX capabilities being exposed as woefully insufficient for scaled-up enterprise voice deployments. In this case, direct routing and other integrations are incredibly popular, but the necessary skills that span comms, the Microsoft environment and project management, in general, can be difficult for a single supplier to deliver. For a truly bespoke solution that aligns UC technology with your business goals, specialist skills are a must and taking the trouble to seek them out will pay dividends
2 - Open up
Openness is the key to your success from now on. You’ll have learned first hand that lockdowns aren’t nice, so don’t get locked-in to a vendor roadmap you’ll struggle to escape. Open APIs, SDKs and ready-made integrations capable of connecting the dots are key to achieving the technical collaboration you’ve dreamed of. APIs/SDKs enable IT workers and developers to immediately insert communications into an ever-changing work environment that requires workflow mapping. This helps users adjust to new work patterns, and prevents organisations from becoming victims of change. Of course, ‘openness’ doesn’t mean compromising on data protection and security, so apply secure-by-design principles when developing your solution. And don’t forget to keep your options open too; you don’t have to settle for anything that doesn’t work for you
3 - Think: Mobile First
I know, the phrase has been bandied around enough to warrant the title ‘cliche’, but cliches often stem from truth and in this situation that’s certainly the case. A user's first preference is their smartphone. It’s their pocket office, softening the edges between work and home. To make UC a compelling option, the solution you offer needs to support mobile or it may not succeed in being fully adopted. Working back to the desktop from the mobile is the way you’ll ensure your solution becomes indispensable to your users. Your Mobile First thinking also needs to stretch across your organisation, beyond office-based knowledge workers to the ‘frontline’. In fact, knowledge workers are likely to be far better already from a mobile UC perspective, compared to the untapped potential among those who we all increasingly refer to as ‘key workers’. Putting UC into their pockets will be aided by rugged devices
4 - UX is the key
A well-designed user experience is essential. With all the tweeting, Snapchatting, Whatsapping and even Facebook messaging flying around, you’ll need to compete with something that feels equally intuitive; that means streamline, declutter and contextualise. A further opportunity here lies in enabling the video experience to be equally intuitive and easy to use, as the importance of this communications channel solidifies as a long-term, post-pandemic substitute for many face-to-face interactions
5 - It’s your cloud: benefit from it
Many organisations have embraced a move to the cloud, but a good number are still weighing up their options and deciding whether to keep their hosted UC setup or migrate to a hybrid environment. The key factors to consider here are flexibility and interoperability. Use the cloud to your ends, for your needs, to tie comms together on any and every device you and your users need. Plus with the cost-savings that come with cloud solutions, you get to own your solution in a cost-effective way!
These steps should get you well on the way to a UC infrastructure that’s as unique as you are.
