Of all the industries we have assessed over the last few months, service management has probably had the most multi-faceted impact. On the one hand, demand from IT and unified communication service providers has skyrocketed amid the growing reliance on digital technology. However, the sector has coped admirably, adapting service delivery systems for a remote working world.
Research reveals that over 7 in 10 IT professionals continue to be effective in their service management tasks, aided by cloud infrastructure, self-service, and smarter knowledge management. But there are improvement areas, like the lack of virtual agents and self-service in approximately 1 in 4 cases. This trend extends across contact centres and other external service delivery scenarios as well.
As the industry continues to transform, we were eager to explore the most prominent trends from 2020, key takeaways for service management leaders, and what lies ahead in 2021.
UC Today sat down with experts from Virsae, Uboss, and Nectar for an insightful round table on service management. Virsae is a cloud-based service management platform provider, while Uboss is a back-office automation company for cloud platforms, and Nectar offers a centralised multi-platform monitoring system.
Read on to know these exclusive insights and what they tell us.
Which Customer Trends Ruled Service Management in 2020?
As in most cases, the pandemic and consequent WFH has been a driving force for service management this year. From remote working at scale to greater reliance on data, and, of course, accelerating implementation timelines, our experts noted a massive overhaul across 2020.
Ian McCarthy, Director UK & EMEA at Virsae:
The survey we mentioned at the beginning specified crossing the corporate perimeter to be a major problem, something 78% of professionals overcame by switching to the cloud. Virsae’s Ian McCarthy agreed, commenting on the rise of a hybrid model where employees switch between the office (within the perimeter) and their homes (outside the perimeter) as the circumstances would allow.
“The increasingly web-centric world of the emerging workplace model extends communications technology to far corners. This requires systems managers to wrestle ever more complex technical issues to maintain a high-quality customer and user experience,” he added.
And the sector has had to deal with these technical issues in a remarkably short span of time.
Iain Sinnott, VP of Sales for Uboss:
Uboss’s Iain Sinnott reiterated similar challenges, adding that implementation timelines are now much faster in response.
“The immediate challenge of service and application deployment on mass, in a three-week window, highlighted the power and effectiveness of automated service provisioning and service management,” he said. Customers with integrated commercial and contract rules were able to satisfy demand without any loss of revenue or additional manpower costs.
Sinnott is also optimistic about the long term implications of this trend.
“The major change in 2020 has been coronavirus and the public health directives which changed the business landscape forever in just a few short months,” said Sinnott. “The results of this enforced homeworking trial have been very positive. The move to true cloud solutions has leapt forward 2 years. Real-time, on-demand application and service deployment remains the most visible change.”
This trend has seen several new converts for cloud-based UC.
Tim Armstrong, Vice President of Product at Nectar:
According to Nectar’s Tim Armstrong, 2020 was an important year for customers still on the fence about Unified Communication as a Service (UCaaS).
“For those organisations that had not already embraced UC (or had not been using UC for telephony), the pandemic has created a real burden. Not just in the context of technology platforms but also in the context of user adoption and experience. Many organisations had already adopted UCaaS, but if an organisation was undecided, the pandemic certainly pushed many of them into rapid migration,” he said.
Ultimately, it all boils down to productivity and service management’s critical role in achieving it.
“Without question, the dominant trend for 2020 is leveraging UC platforms to enable work-from-home productivity,” Armstrong reaffirmed.
What Will be the Top Challenges for End Customers and Service Consumers in 2021?
Expectedly, the overarching themes from this year will carry on into at least the first two quarters of 2021. But the focus will move from maintaining BAU to actually unlocking fresh business opportunities. Meanwhile, widespread UC and CC innovation will leave service management teams with a diversifying landscape.
Here’s what our experts had to say:
Ian McCarthy, Director UK & EMEA at Virsae:
An important trend McCarthy noted in 2020 was the need for data in service management.
“Globally sourced data is playing a bigger role in driving CX goals and decision making,” McCarthy said. “However, this expanse of data arrives in formats traditional monitoring and analysis tools are ill-equipped to handle.”
“Staying on top of abundant, variously formatted data requires new skills, automated processes, and ITIL-aligned management platforms”
In 2021, a big challenge for UC management will be to go further than simply raising a flag to indicate a problem.
“Until now, data – and answers – have been hidden, trapped in tables, log files and configuration deep within systems. The unification of the cloud, big data, and AI sets the data free to ensure answers are visible and easily discovered,” he said.
This will help to maintain CX quality and compliance while curbing costs, as the hybrid workplace becomes mainstream.
Iain Sinnott, VP of Sales for Uboss:
Uboss’ Iain Sinnott zeroed in on the specific challenges arising from COVID-19 and how they could influence end-customers next year.
“Uncertainty is the challenge we all face,” he said. “For the end customer, there are two elements to consider: a) the operational directives placed on them to safeguard staff health and wellbeing, and b) the effect of the pandemic on their performance”
To address them, service management buyers will need:
- Inbound contact management
- Remote meeting and interaction
- Team management and supervision
Sinnott believes stormy seas could be lying ahead for buyers in 2021, marked by continued uncertainty and faster digital transformation. As a result, a fresh approach to service management purchases is essential.
“This is new territory for the customer. So, close account management, experimentation with applications, services and devices and the freedom to review and change must become the core to their supplier selection,” he recommended.
Tim Armstrong, Vice President of Product at Nectar:
Nectar’s Tim Armstrong suggested one product category that will be on every customer’s radar next year: endpoint devices.
In a WFH environment, managing endpoints is a hassle due to the blurring of lines between the perimeter and the core.
“With meeting rooms on the back burner, there is more need to understand what is happening on a laptop and home WiFi network that might impact the voice and video performance for an end-user”
Interestingly, this isn’t a new trend, really. Service management teams were already geared for endpoint management across meeting rooms and contact centres. This takes on a new dimension in 2021. “The challenge will be the same that IT has had for a long time – massive diversity of endpoint environments and no technical support with physical proximity for troubleshooting and remediation,” he added.
It appears that 2021 will bring roughly the same challenges in a new (and slightly larger) bottle. Teams will grapple with ever-diversifying device environments, thereby having to rethink their purchase decisions. And, as McCarthy said, data could offer an answer.
The key to this lies in using the right technology as a driver of value.
Which Service Management Technology will Drive the Most Value in 2021?
When asked about the most promising technology for 2021, our experts couldn’t agree on a single magic bullet. Instead, they discussed a broad spectrum of technologies – from better integrations and third-party support to analytics and AI. Here are the details:
Ian McCarthy, Director UK & EMEA at Virsae:
McCarthy noted that technology was always valuable for service management teams in providing visibility across their Uc and CC environments. “They can see what matters and act accordingly,” he said, in a nutshell.
2021 will add another layer of value to this by not only guiding actions but by also carrying them out on a near-autonomous basis. That’s why McCarthy’s no.1 technology for 2021 is artificial intelligence (AI) – “AI engines can perform as a virtual engineer to automatically identify improvements, create notifications, recommend actions, and audit changes to take the load off UC support teams.”
Notably, 24% of organisations do not employ virtual agents, as per research in 2020. This is all set to change. “When systems intelligence works in hand with AI, profound improvements emerge,” McCarthy said, driving home the point with an example from his company, Virsae.
In the heat of the transition to at-home work, contact centres using Virsae Service Management could track the quality of every customer interaction right down to agent level. They can prioritise callers away from agents impacted by call quality issues to those with pristine audio quality. They also route audio paths around bottlenecks to deliver a better call experience with less waiting time.”
AI for lower efforts and better customer experience will be the technology trend to watch out for in 2021.
Iain Sinnott, VP of Sales for Uboss:
Uboss’ Iain Sinnott spoke about how smarter integrations could solve the device diversification challenge for service management teams.
“Managing 3rd party productivity and reporting tools within the same proposition enables providers to win a broader share of the customers’ technology budget, reducing competitor tenure with the customer and maximising the end-customer’s technology dividend,” Sinnott told us. For Uboss, the Cisco-Broadsoft integration has helped achieve exactly this, driving up recurring revenues and multiplying system capabilities.
But this also means that service management solution providers can’t place too much emphasis on one revenue stream.
In the face of widely available integrations, Sinnott predicts that there will be a hit to entirely one-dimensional players. At the end of the day, Sinnott says, “The technology or the management platform, which makes service consumption across multiple products and multiple vendors seamless, will thrive in this volatile environment.”
Tim Armstrong, Vice President of Product at Nectar:
Nectar’s Tim Armstrong echoes Iain McCarthy’s thoughts around data playing a bigger role in driving CX goals and decision-making.
“Analytics and testing around voice quality, specifically for contact centre agents, will drive most of our agenda into 2021,” he shared with us. Analytics forms the lion’s share of Nectar’s business, with the company offering data-driven solutions for UC monitoring, diagnostics, VoIP quality, and CX assurance. Armstrong believes that the company’s offering for Microsoft Teams will be of particular importance next year.
“Our solution for Teams adds a lot of value over the built-in tools from Microsoft, and we’re seeing a steep increase in interest for our solution around analytics and troubleshooting, particularly for PSTN calls,” he said.
This makes sense, given the growing importance of integrations in a bid to address the challenges of a diverse service management ecosystem.
Tell Us Your Prediction for the Biggest Game-Changing Trend Next Year?
2021 will witness industry activity gain fresh momentum as the technologies adopted this year mature and start generating ROI. This could pave the way for fresh investments, some of our experts believe, and will also allow service management teams to achieve greater efficiency. “Doing more with less” and continued innovation are predicted to be central themes for next year. Read our experts’ thoughts:
Ian McCarthy, Director UK & EMEA at Virsae:
Ian McCarthy stressed the potential of AI in service management. Specifically, he believes that the technology will be implemented in the form of AIOps, or “the application of analytics and machine learning to big data, to automate and improve IT operations.”
AIOps will help in the industry’s efforts to do more with less by crunching massive volumes of network and machine data to find patterns beyond the realm of human operators.
“The leap forward will automate routine practices, increase the accuracy and speed of issue recognition, and enable IT staff to more effectively meet growing demands. This will better support the increasing CX quality and compliance challenges facing business,” McCarthy predicts.
Iain Sinnott, VP of Sales for Uboss:
Uboss’ Iain Sinnott expects digital transformation deadlines to come up sooner than expected. “In 2021, we will see the customer behaviour represent the pattern most of us expected not to see until 2022 or 2023,” he noted, and service management must evolve in tandem. Once again, this means doing more with less. Sinnott believes that companies must focus on “deploying the correct technology at a user level to human productivity without the loss of the all-important customer experience.”
To achieve this, the first step is moving to the cloud, even before one can hope to gain from AI, analytics, virtual agents, or anything else.
“AI, machine learning (ML) and robotic interaction will undoubtedly grow. But, while your staff headcount may fall over time as a ratio to customers, their individual and team performance must grow. And that is the Cloud Communications opportunity,” he said.
So, with yet another wave of transformation just around the corner, cloud adoption could be a game-changing trend in 2021.
“Working with the Cloud Computing Association (CCA), we know that many platform owners had product portfolios that could deliver results not yet demanded by the mass market. So, their challenge is to automate, simplify, and move faster to customer self-service and e-commerce – targets once reserved for 2023,” mentioned Sinnott.
Tim Armstrong, Vice President of Product at Nectar:
Armstrong highlighted a small but important trend that could come into its own in 2021, which is end-user self-service.
According to Armstrong, this will be geared more for business users, bridging the technical expertise divide. “We’ll see more demand for automated self-service. This helps non-technical end-users to help themselves with natural language insights and automated coaching. The idea is to encourage user behaviour and environment optimisation that sets an end-user up for successful and high-quality UC experiences,” he said.
After all, in today’s WFH world, everyone is a UC power user – regardless of their level of technical understanding. Automated self-service backed by AI will not only make life easier for service management teams, but it will also enhance self-sufficiency for those of us trying to supercharge our productivity from home.
From these exclusive insights from some of the industry’s leading experts, the future seems interesting for the service management industry. Opportunities sit side by side with the continuing challenges of 2021, and several players are more than eager to rise to the occasion. As technology breakthroughs become more frequent, responding to the signs of the times, companies like Virsae, Uboss, Nectar, and others pave the road ahead for engaging experiences and uninterrupted business.
Thank you for tuning in for this round table. Don’t forget to check out the rest of UC Trends 2021 for more such conversations with industry experts.
