With the festive season drawing ever nearer, it’s time to begin thinking about wrapping up 2019 and looking towards 2020.
This year has been another great year for UC, with Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) continuing to grow on a global level, AI capabilities becoming more integrated with UC services, and UC becoming increasingly cloud-centric.
But with technologies constantly evolving and enhancing the way we work, what advancements will 2020 bring to the world of UC? These are the top four things we believe we’ll see in the next year.
“Video centric” will continue to rise
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Richard Buxton[/caption]
The video-centricity of UC has been growing steadily for the past few years, and this practice has now become widely deployed in enterprises, not just as a means of social communication.
The quality, reliability and simplicity of video devices and software has helped to drive user adoption. Creating video conferences used to be a cumbersome process – now it is as simple as making a telephone call.
However, it is unlikely that, even in 2020, the days of some people hiding from in-room cameras or putting post-it notes over their laptop webcams are over just yet.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) will become ingrained into technology and business processes
The surge of artificial intelligence will continue to make an impact on the industry, and AI will increasingly become ingrained in UC technology processes across all industries. This is especially prevalent when it comes to customer contact, as businesses now understand that AI can help to improve customer experience, by quickly and reliably providing appropriate information to their customers without human intervention. When real life agents do need to become involved in a customer interaction, this can be seamless and efficient.
This can also provide rich analytics to help determine how well the contact centre is performing, and how engaged their customers are across the entire omni-channel environment. Realtime sentiment tracking can determine customer satisfaction during a call, rather than relying on post-call surveys.
Additionally, AI can help to improve the end-user experience in meetings. We’ve already seen platforms such as Cisco Webex providing tools that can identify who is in a meeting using facial recognition and use Cognitive Collaboration to provide relevant (publicly accessible) information about the participants. It can also identify whether the appropriate rooms and resources are being used by detecting occupancy and engagement during meetings
