With all the trends Soluno has seen on the rise during the COVID-19 pandemic, Patrik Sorqvist, Group CEO, Soluno BC, said that contact center technology is on a path for perpetual growth. The trends he’s seen in collaboration, remote work, and workplace communication have been visible for a while. Sorqvist noted – they got kicked into overdrive by the pandemic. “COVID-19 caused organizations to revaluate the experiences they present to customers, end-users, everyone,” he said.
Mobile-first propositions are on the rise across Europe, although he notes that they are slower to come to market in the UK. Most of the demand for contact center technology this year came from the US. COVID-19 gave a boost to this notion in most countries, making enterprise leaders conscious that the path to the cloud is not linear but perhaps more nuanced than they might have thought.
The most prominent changes to come, according to Sorqvist, will be in the way enterprises do business due to the rapid pace at which companies became obsolete during the pandemic. For some, it came down to ‘adapt or die’ in a matter of months. This was at least for those not willing to shift their critical communications to the cloud or those who did not adopt a hybrid approach.
In the UK and Germany, Sorqvist said that Soluno helped new and existing customers speed up their digital transformation strategies in a matter of days in some cases – despite global lockdowns that acted as an agent of change and one of the key drivers for how we provision communications technology moving forward.
“Today, if you want to deliver good customer service, it often means doing so without manual touch, meaning that you need to digitize your customer journey. This is one of the many reasons Zoom gained so much popularity during the pandemic”
Digital First is the Wave of the Future
Looking back, this could be why some of these companies had security issues, Sorqvist argues. He added as they did not have the security knowledge required to handle an influx of new users at the beginning. The express goal, trying to grow their user-base.
As such, Sorqvist maintains that there is a new focus shifting from features. “We’re in a mature market now, indicating the winning proposition comes down to how natural you make it for partners to install your technology.” Self-service portals and automation are also here to stay from this point out, as it is no longer time-friendly to sit and learn manual processes.
A few years ago, it was virtually impossible to get started without a dedicated technician to facilitate quick user adoption. Today there is less of a barrier in doing so because we’ve eliminated many of the hand-operated processes required to bring companies into the digital age their communications, Sorqvist said.
Multi-Vendor Solutions
“Integration is one of the keys to victory,” according to Sorqvist. Today, he said, you need to build value in a multi-vendor environment, not try to compete with Microsoft Teams. It is about finding the gaps that exist within the software and enhancing it. He said, Soluno does not want to be better than Microsoft Teams – it wants to contribute value to the app.
“The line between customers, competitors, and vendors will become even more blurred in the future. Take the UK, for instance, we use Mitel as a vendor in our solution. At the same time, we compete with a different over-the-top service from Mitel in that same market, and that’s ok”
He said that Soluno looks at these connections as mutually beneficial and does not to see competitors as enemies. This, he said, means being faster in execution and innovation – a significant hurdle for some of the larger and more bureaucratic organizations.
What about the Channel?
Looking toward 2021, channel partners will stop searching for vendors they can only resell – they want a partner who lends them access to a sustainable business model and lets them expand and promote their value proposition, according to Sorqvist. There will also be a lot of adoption, Sorqvist said, and a lot of ‘moving up the value chain’ in 2021.
This happened in the VoIP industry, he said, adding that many of the players in the ‘VoIP’ market have had to build in collaboration tools so they could stay relevant. The contact center will be a big push, moving forward, which could even lead to the end of unified communications and make contact center even more prevalent.
