When you only have five minutes between finishing work and the customer helpdesks closing for the day, needless to say you will always be number 50 in the queue when all you need is a quick answer to a simple question.
Maybe you’re just looking to speak to someone directly – to discuss payment details, change a contract or just have a rant lodge a complaint – but instead you’re being herded to the live chat room or worse still, forced to write a letter before being given a phone number of ‘last resort’.
It seems no matter which method of communication you want to use, you’re forced towards the preferred method of the person or company you’re trying to contact – a method that is not always helpful to you.
The business communications disconnect
This isn’t just a consumer-facing phenomenon – it applies to internal business communications as well. Some people work from a smartphone, some from their laptop, and – despite rumours of its demise – a great many of us still routinely use a PC and deskphone. But today, we still see large numbers of disjointed systems, each providing a single communications channel or information silo, as well as the disjointed use of applications – whether corporately approved or another case of shadow IT.
Today’s communications ecosystems have been steadily growing in complexity, with more moving parts, more service providers and more devices. Add to this the growing number of connected things that are designed to ‘talk’ to us, and let’s face it, it’s going to get even more complex. So, what’s the answer?
CPaaS – the simple way to connect people and processes
Put simply, effective communication is all about the user experience and delivering the right high-quality experience in the right media to the right device in the right place at the right time. For some, out-of-the-box UC&C solutions are going to be the best way forward, but every business is unique and each has its own processes. This is where Communication Platform as a Service (/unified-communications/cpaas) comes into its own – offering more freedom to develop communications channels to connect people and processes, wherever the user is located.
CPaaS offers an off-the-shelf development environment to add real-time communications features directly into business applications – without the need to build backend infrastructure and interfaces.
Open ecosystems with APIs
The right CPaaS platform will enable IT teams to integrate and unify existing core communications systems with more advanced cloud-based capabilities, to create a digital communications ecosystem that extends well beyond business borders. This can include business partners, 3rd party providers, mobile teams or customers in a single, comprehensive digital workspace.
Through open APIs, not only are we creating the ability to develop industry-specific communications processes that tie in directly with how businesses operate, but are able to introduce automation and intelligent tools.
Even robots need a human touch
Virtual Personal Assistants (VPAs), including existing consumer-facing VPAs such as Siri and Alexa, and other intelligent agent technologies can be initiated through the simple conversational interfaces of the connected platform – think chatbots answering basic customer queries and frequently asked questions, or simple status checks made via in-app messaging where the AI directs you to the information you need. The result of this will be increased employee productivity as more routine requests are completed without human intervention, allowing employees to focus on more valuable tasks.
It’s not just you and I who will be making requests. As more devices hook up to the Internet of Things, these connected ‘things’ will have the necessary ‘intelligence’ to ask for support. Printers or medical devices, equipment on the factory floor, security cameras or even the soap dispenser in the bathroom will be able to request human assistance or maintenance. Many of these will be for simple tasks, but will need human intervention – a connected platform needs to be in place to connect these things with the right people through automated notifications. By applying the necessary intelligence to such tasks, we can improve businesses processes and provide a superior level of service while maintaining cost effectiveness.
Bringing it all together
CPaaS allows you to launch new services for your staff and customers. From emergency notifications to chatbot integration, from contextual customer information synced during calls or web interactions to enterprise-grade collaboration tools. The joy of CPaaS is that building on the same platform enables everything to connect. Above all, CPaaS allows us to seamlessly bring together the ‘provider of value’ with the ‘user of value’.
Craig Walker is the VP of Cloud Services at Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise. Craig has more than 25 years’ worth of domestic and international experience at managerial levels of publicly-held telecommunication companies, start-up ventures and within the business partner environment.
