Recent research from Bandwidth‘s Enterprise Communications Landscape has found that more than 90% of IT leaders find managing their communications systems challenging. The study looked into the challenges that approximately 1,000 IT leaders across the world face, uncovering that the majority (56.5%) are managing between two and four carriers, while almost one quarter of respondents are managing five to nine carriers. On top of all this, 49% of respondents are managing three or more UC and CC platforms.
It’s therefore no surprise that amidst all this complexity, fewer than half of IT leaders feel that their communications solutions are meeting their needs. This is highlighted by the statistic that out of the average 364 SaaS apps used by enterprises, less than half are used regularly by employees, resulting in wasted resources. With projected worldwide spending of US 4.5 trillion in 2023, it’s clear that disconnected digital environments threaten enterprises’ flexibility, scalability, and UX. In addition, this is driving up costs.
A significant challenge is embedding interoperability into all of these disjointed applications. The survey revealed that 55% of enterprises have to enable more than four third party tools to interoperate with their communications stack. The most commonly utilised third party tools include call recording, messaging applications, voice transcription, IVR, PCI payment processing, voice biometric authentication, NLP, sentiment analysis and real-time coaching. However, ensuring these custom contact centre services interoperate across call flows requires careful analysis and is a great challenge to IT leaders.
The aim isn’t only to ensure interoperability for agents; the user experience is an even greater priority for IT leaders. UX is the number one thing that keeps IT leaders up at night. This is followed by cloud migrations, call reliability, and price point.
Across both employees and customers, experience is seen as a valuable differentiator. By 2024, organisations converging both to offer total experience (TX) will outperform competitors in both employee experience and CX metrics by 25%, according to a recent Gartner webinar. Achieving excellent TX remains a challenge because as all of the employee, customer, or conversational AI tools are different, the strategy requires a communications cloud to integrate and create interoperability across solutions.
Nevertheless, enterprises are becoming more mature in their deployments and adopting ‘as-a-service’ solutions. The survey found that the market has begun to see a trend of convergence between UCaaS and CCaaS which is set to simplify architectures.
Compliance is the final challenge addressed by the survey, with regulations and emergency legislation top of mind. 44% of US enterprises said they aren’t confident in their emergency compliance with only 56% of respondents saying they are fully compliant with regulations such as RAY BAUM’s Act and Kari’s Law. The 47% of respondents that have a hybrid or fully remote workforce stated that managing compliance is even more complicated for them.
