An undercurrent beneath the hybrid vs return-to-office debate has been what it might portend for the future of UC and collaboration technology.
The sector’s explosion during the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent normalisation of working from home has plateaued in recent years, an inevitability almost half a decade on.
But with more and more organisations asking their workers to return to the office full-time, including tech businesses Amazon and Dell, how seriously should we take this trend? And if we are taking it seriously, how much of an impact will it have on our industry’s growth?
“We think it will not work,” Wildix CEO Steve Osler told UC Today. “Even if we go back to the office, we will keep meeting people online, even from the office.”
“Of course, we (Wildix) are against going back to work in the office. We are looking for a fully remote, smart work-life balance. While many companies are trying to go back to working from the office, most notably Amazon, going back from January 1. But there are others, even our competitors, forcing people to go back to the office. That raises the question of why you should invest in unified communication tools if you have to go to the office.”
Osler outlines that many of Wildix’s customers are also telling the company that it and the industry at large need to change the way we use technology to communicate.
“With in-person communication, when you involve several people in a meeting, it’s very hard to interact with all the people in the same office anyway,” Osler elaborated. “Also, the hiring and the way we interact with people have changed. So this forces people to anyway use the unified communication tools. As you are using it anyway, why move everybody to the same room? You can keep working in front of your computer. They find it more efficient. So the reality is that they go back to the office to have a video call with the guy on the desk.”
Osler and Wildix are emphatically pursuing a different direction.
“We think that especially now with all the automation and artificial intelligence that is coming, the work will become more and more demanding because what is left to humans is becoming more complicated than before,” Osler said. “Because all the simple stuff was done by the machine first. Now, artificial intelligence will take another piece.”
“We need to balance stress with a more human-centric way of managing our daily lives,” he continued. “So, it is very important to be able to organise the work day, the work week, and where to work, balancing personal life with what the company needs.”
Maybe we can increase productivity by two percent by forcing people to go back to the office, but we will destroy our society. That’s not a good thing.”
Wildix Succeeds As A Partner-Centric Business
Osler founded Wildix, a PBX and VoIP PBX business, with his brother in 2005. They decided to be channel-focused as the key differentiator for the company’s go-to-market strategy.
“The reason for going through the channel was that unified communication is important for many businesses,” Osler explained. “The value they can receive from their communication with their customers is a stronger component of their profitability. So, it’s an important choice for a company how they decide to communicate. It’s far from being a commodity from this standpoint.”
Wildix has a deserved reputation for being loyal to and focused on its channel partners, understanding that they know their customers better than anyone.
“Our partners take care of the customers,” Osler said. “So they project, deploy, and maintain our solutions. They really create what goes under the name of communication-enabled business processes.”
“They are experts, they are already in touch with these customers, and they know their business model. The capabilities they have with our tools are far more complex and efficient than an off-the-shelf unified communication solution, which is why it’s still available.”
“Of course, it does also increase the cost, which the customers and the partner will cover. So, what we were looking for was not a mass-market unified communication. We can do that only because we have partners who are technical experts in the solution and business experts in our customers’ business models.”
2024 And Year Two Of AI
How does Osler reflect on 2024, aside from the aforementioned discussion around the future of work?
“2024 had a big push on AI, of course,” Osler stated. “We are all into AI now, and we are starting to see some good results. Of course, we are especially focused on using AI for sales teams because we always say that it’s business first. So, unified communication is not for the sake of communicating for its own sake but to do business with communication.”
Osler highlighted that the first departments you’d consider enhancing with AI would be sales and support teams. So Wildix is investing in AI for salespeople, especially AI that offers them advice while they’re on the call.
“A big difference between what we do and what our competitors do is that we don’t analyse every single interaction,” Osler clarified. “That’s something that happens where each interaction happens in isolation from the others. They are islands of communication. So even the insights you get are not so useful because they don’t take into consideration the whole notion.”
“By the way, we are focusing mainly on B2B interactions, where the sales process can be very long—it can last months. You have a group of people from the purchasing side and sales side, and we integrated everything with the CRM sales force, mainly.”
Wildix’s solutions then analyse the flow of communication over several months, outlining the real situation of a prospect or customer to managers and salespeople. If the customer is happy or unhappy during a single conversation, most salespeople wouldn’t need AI to understand how it’s going. However, months of interaction with different people when the salespeople in question aren’t there is invaluable data.
“So, really, what you want to know is what happens when you are not listening to your customer and when somebody else is,” Osler clarified. “We use the value selling framework to give a full picture to all people involved with managing a customer about the real situation regarding the customer path in the company.
The Power Plays In Retail And Healthcare
One of Osler’s major 2025 predictions is around the retail and healthcare sectors as prospective power plays. What does he mean by this?
“We have the most experience in retail via (frontline worker communications solution) X-hoppers, which is a beautiful vertical. This is basically a new market because it’s not really an application that was in use before.”
“It helps a lot to simplify and make the life of a frontline worker safer and more efficient,” Osler expanded. “As the frontline worker is often the first occupation of younger people or less protected people, we see it as a big benefit because it lets them become onboarded faster and reach efficiency sooner. So, it requires less training just because they have this communication device. They can ask for help any time of the day and interact with artificial intelligence, so this requires less training.”
Early customers are telling Wildix that the X-hoppers tool is helping reduce employee churn, an evergreen problem for retail organisations given the traditionally difficult working conditions and low pay.
“It’s a very demanding job, but the pay is not so high,” Osler added. “So, using our tool, they get onboarded sooner, so they get paid a bit more quickly. They feel safer because sometimes when you are in front of customers, the situation can become a bit uncomfortable. So they have this device that is always in live communication, so they can ask for help or consult or whatever.”
We really see that it will be a trend because it benefits the business because the time to revenue is shorter and you have a way better customer support and customer service, and it benefits the frontline workers at the same time. It’s really a win-win situation. We see that adoption is increasing quickly without having to create new policies. We give the devices, they try, and they love to use them.”
Osler foresees the same dynamic working for frontline workers in healthcare, particularly around caring for customers. “Safety, better communication, faster communication, and especially the ability to work as a team rather than as individual workers isolated in the workspace,” Osler said.
What Does 2025 And Beyond Hold For Wildix?
Osler emphasised that some parts of communication are getting commoditised, meaning that unified communication as a service has reached a certain standard.
“Finally, we understand what UCaaS is and what is not,” Osler wryly observed. “It was not so clear four or five years ago. That means that the price for the basic low-level UCaaS will be more competitive.”
“As we said before, we look to stand out with our partners by being more for our customers, being more integrated, and more relevant for their business model, not a generic business model. On the other hand, we are also verticalising the products, which is why X-Hoppers and then X-Bees are workable.”
What about the impact of AI? Is that in danger of commoditisation any time soon?
“We don’t think that AI will change much from the commodity perspective, meaning that, at the moment, we are all using the same AI from the same vehicle,” Osler answered.
“So, until there is some vertical in AI, we don’t see it as a differentiator. It is a must-have for everybody now to have some AI features embedded in the platform. They are very useful. We work to catch up, to find new ideas, and to make it more useful and competitive. But for the time being, we see it as part of the commodity market.”
