Navigating Rocky Workforce Changes Ahead

Layoffs and hiring swings are making UCaaS and CCaaS planning harder, as CallTower helps buyers flex Microsoft, Cisco, Zoom and Teams.

Gabriel Avner

For organizations looking to plan out their UCaaS and CCaaS budgets over the next six to twelve months, the picture outside their doors is confusing at best.

The past two months have been filled with headlines as the Big Tech cos, think Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and plenty more have announced massive layoffs. We’re talking about tens of thousands of folks out of a job as their former employers fight to be the king of the AI hill.

But it’s not just the big players.

Smaller companies and especially startups have been hit as VC cash becomes harder to come by, leading them to make cuts of their own as they prepare to hibernate until warmer days appear on the horizon.

At the same time, the U.S. job market is booming. The jobs report for January showed that a whopping 517,000 jobs were added that month, beating the pants off of estimates that predicted growth of an otherwise respectable 187,000.

According to the reports, this brought the unemployment rate down to 3.4%. This is the lowest level since May of 1969, soon before everyone took off to head up to Woodstock for some much-needed time off.

Given all of these indicators, it is easy to understand why decision makers are struggling to figure out how many seats to plan for given the mixed signals in the market. Some level of change is normal, usually around seasonal hires like holiday time. But the next few months are going to be tricky.

It’s Hard to Be Flexible When with Your Feet on the Ground

For organizations that are still on-prem based for their voice service, contact center, and other critical business functions, scaling up and down in reaction to market changes can be challenging.

Dealing with physical PSTN infrastructure, servers for Microsoft Teams or Cisco, and even handsets can be difficult to start with on a good day. As your workforce grows and contracts, adjusting this infrastructure can be costly and exceedingly time consuming if changes have to be made.

Then there is the question of how to move between the UCaaS vendors within your organization. Chances are if your company is like most, then you likely have a combination of the leading products in your environment.

Maybe your C-suite is all in on Cisco and you have fallen in love with Webex Calling?
Marketing and Sales are demanding that they have Zoom for their calling and video conferencing since most of their target market prefers it.
Everyone else from operations to R&D enjoy how they can integrate Teams calling and collaboration with the rest of their productivity in the Microsoft O365 cloud suite.

Managing each of these vendors separately can be a lot to juggle. Then having to port numbers between them adds costs and complexity. Even if you are in the cloud, coordinating between these three leading companies is not exactly the best use of your time.

What organizations need at times like these is flexibility and being able to work with vendors that can keep pace with them as their needs ebb and flow in the year ahead.

3 Tips for Flexibility and Efficiency

Speaking with leading UCaaS and CCaaS solutions provider CallTower, UCToday spoke with their Chief Revenue Officer, William Rubio to get his insights on how to navigate decision making for maximum flexibility and efficiency.

Manage Multiple Clouds from One Console

As the number of seats rise and fall in each of your departments, you will find that you will need to shift your purchasing around to match. Moving to cloud deployments means making those adjustments will involve far fewer resources on your end.

Moving your UCaaS and CCaaS to the cloud with CallTower makes it much easier to buy and change licenses between all the major players discussed above as needs change, all through one single vendor.

“Our customers can quickly and easily add or remove licenses for all of the services via our CallTower Connect portal as their requirements change,” says Rubio.

As a Microsoft Gold Partner since 2008; as well as their strong working relationships with Cisco and now Zoom with their acquisition of OneStream Networks last year, he says that CallTower has the deep experience to help customers pick the right solutions for their needs and manage their licenses with all of these vendors.

Future Proof from Porting Pains

Moving numbers between vendors is another common challenge, negatively impacting your organization’s flexibility.

Since CallTower offers Microsoft, Cisco, and Teams, porting between them quickly becomes a thing of the past.

“By moving to CallTower, this will be the last port that you will ever have to do,” says Rubio, “Because if your demands change, or your requirements change, we have the flexibility to move you to the three most common platforms globally. And you'll never have to report your number again.”

Be Realistic About Your Deployments

While the flexibility advantages of a cloud deployment are painfully obvious at this point, not everyone is at the point where they are ready to go 100% to the cloud.

“Each of our customers transitions at their own pace,” says Rubio. He says that when CallTower begins the conversation for implementation with customers, they try to take a very pragmatic approach that focuses on where that organization is realistically at, as well as what their comfort level is.

“In some cases, especially after Covid, we see organizations that are ready to pull the plug completely and we are there to help them run as fast as they want to,” he says. “But in others that may have significant investments in their on-prem configuration, our team works with them on their schedule to help them achieve their goals.”

Before starting any major changes, Rubio says that organizations should have a frank internal conversation about how fast or slow they want to move.

Hope for Sunny Days but Bring an Umbrella

Without a doubt, more rounds of layoffs lay ahead as companies look to trim their payrolls that ballooned during the pandemic boom.

But with every rain cloud, there’s one with a silver lining that eventually breaks for sunlight to come through.

Whether your organization is gearing up for growth or cuts, expect changes to come quickly and make sure that you are ready to respond with flexibility and efficiency no matter the weather.

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