Adopted as a rapid reaction to enable businesses to keep working, services such as Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Skype and others have become the means by which employees maintain communication with customers and colleagues as they work from home.
Now, as the focus turns to what the new normal will look like, it’s clear that traditional working patterns will be changed, at least for the medium term and maybe forever. Platforms like Microsoft Teams have the led the way, partly because employees typically have Office 365 subscriptions and that includes Teams. Now, though, the knee-jerk phase of wondering how to keep everyone connected and working is over. We’re moving into a situation in which fewer employees will be able to come in to offices and working days will be staggered to avoid rush hour congestion on public transport.
“Businesses are at a crucial crossroads and they now have a choice of which way to go,” confirms Nicola Hollerhead, a Client Account Executive at SCB Global, which provides its OPTO4Teams offering that combines the company’s cloud PBX capabilities with Teams. OPTO4Teams brings together a range of advanced features and services including operator functions, disaster recovery, MiFID PCI compliant call recording, call queuing, advanced reporting, IVR and others.
“They’ve had to go into remote working because of the virus but now they can decide what they want to do next,” she adds. “Previously, businesses have thought about remote working in theory and understood its potential to deliver better work-life balance for employees. However, businesses have historically not been willing to move from traditional offices.”
“During lockdown, most companies have found remote working beneficial – and not just in theory,” Hollerhead explains.
“The crossroads we’re at involves deciding whether to move forward and take this as an opportunity to digitally transform and modernise how business will work in future or to go back to the traditional office and not take a new approach”
In reality, a blend of both directions will be adopted by most and, with staged ending of lockdowns likely, this combination is likely to become the normal mode of business. Organisations recognise that the solutions they adopted to address the initial crisis were valuable but temporary and a step-up is needed to make them permanent.
Well-publicised security issues with consumer-grade conferencing solutions have encouraged organisations to consider what they need in future and how they will move their engagement in unified communications beyond basic conferencing. Hollerhead sees OPTO4Teams a means for organisations to access enhanced features and security.
“We want to help businesses transfer to a more modern environment,” she says. “They’re probably already using Teams for conferencing but we add features and global calling plans so they can use Teams as a UC&C system. We can give them a permanent solution with calling, conferencing, advanced analytics, reporting and videoconferencing in one secure, compliant package.”
SCB Global is offering a 90-day, 50-user free trial to organisations that want to assess the benefits and additional features of OPTO4Teams. There’s no change to the existing phone system, users can be added one at a time and existing phone numbers are kept.
“We can guide customers into a permanent solution and grow with their business,” says Hollerhead. “People are only surviving with what they have got today and are figuring out how to change their way of working.”
“We want to help and encourage the conversation so everyone can thrive in future”
