Channel Futures’ 2023 UCaaS Outlook: The Year of Democratization
From low-code to APIs, organizations will be utilizing technology in ways that ultimately distribute power, resources and information more equitably.
December 22, 2022
![UCaaS predictions UCaaS predictions](https://eu-images.contentstack.com/v3/assets/blt10e444bce2d36aa8/blt9a33e37ff0dfaa7f/65240bb58402bd7f6ced4965/UCaaS-predictions.jpg?width=700&auto=webp&quality=80&disable=upscale)
Shutterstock
Natural language processing, decision-making and predictive analysis have made artificial intelligence a serious force for enabling UCaaS and CCaaS. For example, “AI-enhanced communications tools can answer customer questions and provide step-by-step instructions to resolve issues,” said Cass Gilmore, CEO of FluentStream.
In 2023, organizations will be adopting UCaaS tools powered by AI to improve productivity. Among the plethora of resources AI provides, the following just scratches the surface. “It can enable the conversion of voicemail messages to text messages, automate notetaking during meetings and improve workflows,” Gilmore said.
These tools save agents time, freeing them up to address more complicated customer concerns.
According to Zayd Enam, the CEO of contact center AI company, Cresta, next year economic challenges will force businesses to lean on their contact centers to not just create happier customers, but to become meaningful revenue drivers and a strong sales generation driver.
The pandemic pushed through digital transformation and accelerated companies’ efforts to respond more quickly to customer inquiries and demands. Speedy responses became an essential part of organizations’ customer experience strategy during the pandemic, said Eric Krapf, publisher of No Jitter. The news and analysis website shares parent company Informa with Channel Futures.
“As it happened, the earliest, simplest use cases for CPaaS — things like SMS-based alerts and reminders — were tailor-made for pandemic-driven scenarios like food delivery and curbside pickup,” Krapf wrote in an opinion piece.
However, enterprises can go beyond these simple CPaaS use cases. They can adopt CPaaS low-code/no-code options.
“The idea that you don’t need high-priced, potentially hard-to-find developers to add functionality to an application has obvious appeal for enterprises,” Krapf said. “It’s an especially powerful idea for CX, which has become such a critical differentiator for enterprises competing for business from a public whose demands and ways of interacting with businesses are constantly changing.”
CPaaS low-code/no-code is purpose-driven to an enterprise’s needs, and it gives them more autonomy over their technology development for CX. Companies will continue to adopt low-code/no-code tools in the year ahead.
Remote work remains constant heading into the new year. More organizations are putting trust and control into the hands of managers to make these work environments successful. Sustainability initiatives are part of that equation for success.
In 2023, “we’ll see more discussion around IT sustainability in terms of how to reduce IT costs as more employees opt to work from home,” said Ian van Reenen, CTO of 1E, an employee experience management firm.
How can this have a more positive impact on the environment?
“Around 70% of the carbon footprint of a laptop comes from the manufacturing process, so a tangible action organizations can take to become more cost-effective and sustainable is to evaluate how they can extend the life cycle of their laptops and other devices. A key question for leaders to ask is how their organizations can more efficiently reuse, repurpose and refresh IT equipment,” van Reenen said.
The pandemic forced companies to prepare for the onslaught of employees working from home. As a result, IT departments had difficulty keeping up with this new dynamic: how to monitor and secure so many remote systems.
“Simultaneously, organizations embraced digital transformation and mobile-first initiatives in the unified communications and collaboration (UCC) and contact center space,” said Elizabeth English, member of SCTC. “As a result, VPNs were often overwhelmed or breached, stalling digital transformation and productivity for remote workers.”
In these circumstances, UCaaS and CCaaS organizations began relying on the principles of zero trust: always authenticating and authorizing based on all available data points; limiting user access; and minimizing blast radius and segment access.
GoTo said they may be a vanguard among UCaaS companies when it comes to embracing zero trust up and down the stack inside its company to protect infrastructure services.
GoTo CEO Paddy Srinivasan told Channel Futures:
“We have multilayer authentication for all our production systems, developer environments, and so forth. It becomes really hard for anyone either with malintent or by negligence to leave something exposed to a bad actor. We are embracing zero trust as a philosophy to protect our internal systems, but also implementing it as concrete technology in many of our products now so that we protect our customers and their data; their endpoints are protected on an ongoing basis.”
To protect on an ongoing basis means getting the zero trust buy in of not just the CISO, but all operations leaders and department heads. Expect zero trust, despite its buzzword status, to still be a topic of conversation in 2023.
API, or application programming interface, is a software tool that permits two applications to talk to each other. APIs allow organizations to extract and share data.
For UCaaS firms, APIs can simplify and accelerate go-to-market strategies; improve customer experiences; increase organizational agility and speed; and create new revenue, market and channel opportunities.
However, how APIs are managed is changing.
Iddo Gino is Rapid’s CEO and founder.
“APIs make it easy to adjust, transform, enrich and consume data – traditionally there was a need for hundreds of highly paid engineers to manage the data and data scientists were needed to understand algorithms,” Gino said. “In 2023, we will see a shift towards APIs technologies managing data as a way to gain insights and also control data related costs which means people will no longer need to have highly developed engineering skills to harness the power of data.”
That’s control back in the hands of the user.
Customer life cycle management, or CLM, according to Forbes, “is the process of tracking and analyzing each stage of this customer lifecycle, assigning metrics to each step and measuring the success of your business based on those metrics.”
In 2023, communications providers who prioritize a long-term commitment to customer lifecycle management will win in the marketplace, according to officials at Mitel.
Daren Finney is SVP of global channel sales at Mitel.
“Now more than ever, mid-market and enterprise-level organizations are looking for help to ensure their systems adequately enable hybrid work and provide flexibility and future-proofing necessary to evolve in a fast-changing world,” Finney said. “Doing this effectively means supplying organizations with more than the latest communications equipment. It means providing actionable data, insights and proactive playbooks partners/providers can use to help their customers modernize their organization through communications.”
The marketplace shift toward customer lifecycle management will continue and partner programs that fully embrace it will see the most engagement.
“Fully engaged partners who are given the right tools and data to respond to customer priorities are positioned to benefit the most from this focus on CLM as customers look to drive sustained value from their communications investments – now and into the future,” said Lana King, VP of partner programs, training and enablement at Mitel.
To further support CLM, there will be a trend toward programs that encourage partners to further embrace their role as trusted advisors throughout the customer experience. Engaged partners will drive value through CLM and have more say-so in the marketplace.
Customer life cycle management, or CLM, according to Forbes, “is the process of tracking and analyzing each stage of this customer lifecycle, assigning metrics to each step and measuring the success of your business based on those metrics.”
In 2023, communications providers who prioritize a long-term commitment to customer lifecycle management will win in the marketplace, according to officials at Mitel.
Daren Finney is SVP of global channel sales at Mitel.
“Now more than ever, mid-market and enterprise-level organizations are looking for help to ensure their systems adequately enable hybrid work and provide flexibility and future-proofing necessary to evolve in a fast-changing world,” Finney said. “Doing this effectively means supplying organizations with more than the latest communications equipment. It means providing actionable data, insights and proactive playbooks partners/providers can use to help their customers modernize their organization through communications.”
The marketplace shift toward customer lifecycle management will continue and partner programs that fully embrace it will see the most engagement.
“Fully engaged partners who are given the right tools and data to respond to customer priorities are positioned to benefit the most from this focus on CLM as customers look to drive sustained value from their communications investments – now and into the future,” said Lana King, VP of partner programs, training and enablement at Mitel.
To further support CLM, there will be a trend toward programs that encourage partners to further embrace their role as trusted advisors throughout the customer experience. Engaged partners will drive value through CLM and have more say-so in the marketplace.
FluentStream’s Cass Gilmore
As UCaaS, CCaaS and CPaaS evolve, companies, partners and customers find that they are in greater control of data and technology and will be so in 2023, experts told Channel Futures. This allows for a certain kind of democratization within these industries and the market. For example, artificial intelligence now gives companies more tools, according to Cass Gilmore, CEO at FluentStream, to “personalize and enrich the customer experience.”
Solving Complex Problems
When it comes to the world of hybrid work, sustainability initiatives allow organizations to engage every employee around the reduction of the carbon footprint as they work from home. This ultimately reduces costs across the board. And engaging employees for the greater good is a form of democratization. Expect to see more sustainability goals among UCaaS vendors in 2023 as they promote these values not only among their employees but among partners and customers as well.
Regarding new products, some analysts have suggested that UCaaS has possibly reached a developmental saturation point. To paraphrase one expert, “how many more language choices can a UCaaS company add?” That said, vendors providing both UCaaS and CCaaS options have an opportunity to solve complex problems within the contact center market. Some of the technology is serving to fill the void due to agent churn or attrition, which for some contact centers reaches more than 50%. Other tools help the agents that remain on staff have more control to make better decisions on behalf of customers.
For the year ahead, the following are the predictions we gathered for the UCaaS, CCaaS and CPaaS space. In addition to FluentStream’s Gilmore, the following individuals offered their perspectives:
Cresta’s Zayd Enam
No Jitter’s Eric Krapf
1E’s Ian van Reenen
SCTC’s Elizabeth English
GoTo’s Paddy Srinivasan
Rapid’s Gino Iddo
Mitel’s Daren Finney
Mitel’s Lana King
See what they had to say in the slideshow above.
Want to contact the author directly about this story? Have ideas for a follow-up article? Email Claudia Adrien or connect with her on LinkedIn. |
About the Author(s)
You May Also Like