Fuze recently hosted its productfest 2020, during which it brought together a panel of customers to discuss how their utilisation of unified communications and collaboration has changed because of the pandemic. Eric Hanson, the Chief Marketing Officer of Fuze, began by acknowledging that the impacts of COVID-19 on everyone’s working lives are personal, distinct, and individual. No one option fits all requirements and, although there are commonalities in terms of the functions people need, different businesses have widely varied demands and practices.
Jason Mahoney, the Principal Telecommunications Analyst at PTC, was quick to highlight the perceived freedoms of working from home but drilled down into the efficiency benefits. “COVID saves me travelling into Boston every day,” he said. “In the old days, sales representatives were tied to desk phones or old-school softphones which didn’t really have the features they needed. We’ve benefitted from moving our pivotal call centres and offices to NICE InContact or Fuze Contact Center which have enabled us to maintain contact with our customers, our employees and our partners this whole time.”
Others found providing highly personal services remotely was more challenging. “With COVID, we had 24 hours and 60 sites that we had to shut down from providing care,” explained Stacie DePeau, the CIO of non-profit disability services and support provider Easterseals Southern California. “We now have a hybrid environment operating, but some of our high need people don’t have internet connections or devices so we started a tech lending library with more than 500 devices.”
For Michele Buschman, the Vice President of Information Services at American Pacific Mortgage, business was already experiencing a boom when the pandemic hit, so a major challenge was to recruit new personnel to meet the demands and keep all employees connected and engaged. “We’d implemented Fuze about three years ago as our last big item to get off-premises and to enable an agile, secure environment so we were able to run our business pretty easily,” she said. “The challenge for us was to hire staff remotely using video tools and then cope with hardware shortages and put training in place.”
The company uses Fuze for calling and in the call centre to support inbound and outbound calling and video for collaboration at some sites. Adoption of video has increased among employees, and Buschman is focused on enabling the business for the future. “We’re addressing how to support workers in home office environments with risk reduction like ergonomic desks and comfy chairs.”
Vimal Thomas, the Vice President of IT at Yamaha, was similarly well-prepared. “In preparation for a situation like this, we’d launched cloud-based apps six years ago, so we moved employees over to working from home on a Friday and they were fully-productive on Monday,” he said.
“We have a very diverse mix of employees so adoption of Fuze had been at different rates. One issue we had when we first put Fuze in place a few years ago was that we removed desk phones, but when COVID hit, people were over their resistance. Usage of chat tripled and audio and web conferencing went up eight times”
No one is suggesting the pandemic has been a good thing. Instead, organisations are looking to take the positives they have learnt and the satisfaction workers have with the UC tools they have turned to. The next step will be to formalise more flexible ways of working and an increase in working from remote locations. Several of the panellists emphasised that workers are shifting from large urban centres because of the flexibility new ways of working away from traditional offices is enabling. For example, people from East Coast cities are moving to New Hampshire or Vermont, while Mahoney says PTC has seen people move from California to Idaho. Robust, secure, cloud-based unified communication and collaboration tools are the enablers of these shifts and hybrid work models are seeming to become the standard way of doing business.
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