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As unified collaboration and communication (UC&C) technologies expanded and evolved over the last few years, we are all now more connected, with more ways to communicate from more locations and devices than ever before. But it’s hardly time to ‘set and forget’ your enterprise’s business communications strategy because the pace of UC&C innovation is far from over. Enterprise businesses are facing three complex challenges that will demand the business communications industry to innovate and adapt to support them.
But before we get into the challenges those disruptors will create, let’s ask a foundational question: What is an enterprise?
We often speak about enterprise organizations as if they were alike, with their only distinguishing characteristic being size. Instead, enterprises differ across a wide range of criteria, including:
- Type of ‘business’: a large manufacturer, global retailer, distributed service organization, and a government entity may have the same large number of employees, but one of them isn’t a business at all. And because they each have fundamentally different charters, the needs of their customer base, IT requirements, and communications operations differ considerably.
- Locations: some enterprises operate in a single country, while others have distributed operations, each of which has laws, policies, and business challenges that differ considerably by location.
- Operational complexity: some enterprises focus on a single line of business, while others have multiple business units that require vastly different IT strategies.
The Bigger They Are…
Being big has its pros and cons. On one hand, enterprises have the benefit of scale. Once they develop an advantage, they can ramp it up more quickly and widely than smaller organizations. On the other hand, when faced with market disruptors, enterprises may need to customize their approach for customer types, locations, and lines of business. The more diverse the enterprise is, the more complex its plans and execution will need to be. And in this case, size is not in their favor. Enterprises are large and their missteps are highly visible. Like a large ship, it can take a long time for large enterprises to respond to the disruptors that lay in the path ahead.
Mitel has been a leader in the enterprise business communications space for decades, and we’ve learned a thing or two about how to navigate around an incoming storm. We found that three disruptors should be on the radar of every enterprise and there are best practices for emerging stronger.
Three Disruptors That Should Be on Every Enterprise’s Radar
Enterprise organizations spent the first two years of the 2020s battling a global pandemic. While they were adapting to that challenge, three new ones were forming:
- The convergence of higher customer expectations with the post-pandemic new normal of hybrid work environments.
- The growing complexity of data privacy and security compliance.
- An increasing need for custom recovery planning as welfare-critical business units grow more reliant on technology.
Let’s tackle the first disruptor below.
Higher Customer Expectations, Meet Emerging Hybrid Work Environments
Early in the pandemic, digital transactions suddenly became the only way of doing business. And even the most brick-and-mortar-loving customers learned to adapt. As we establish a post-pandemic normal, however, enterprises are facing the combination of two distinct disruptors.
Disruptor A: Higher Expectations. Enterprises now must serve a sophisticated digital customer base who have high expectations for personalized service and a low tolerance for businesses that can’t deliver. Sixty-five percent of customers want to buy from companies that offer quick and easy online transactions and 80% of people say they’d switch to a competitor after more than one bad experience.
As the stakes get higher and the penalties get greater, customers expect enterprise organizations to meet them ‘wherever they are,’ be that online via a mobile device, on a phone call to the enterprise contact center, or during virtually any time zone. Delivering this omnipresent and omnichannel quality of service takes on a new level of difficulty when enterprise employees are also working from a wide variety of locations, devices, and time zones.
Disruptor B: Hybrid Work Environments. The latest research makes it clear hybrid work is here to stay. More than two out of three employees who prefer hybrid models say they would be likely to look for other opportunities if asked to return fully in an office or on-site. Not surprisingly, four out of five businesses that offered hybrid models over the past two years intend to retain them.
The Implication: To improve customer service, enterprises must empower their employees to work effectively from anywhere at any time. Employees will need full functionality regardless of where they are, and it must be transparent to optimize productivity and the customer experience.
Mitel’s Solution to Enterprise Disruptors
Mitel provides enterprises with an array of contact center and omnichannel communications solutions that allow their employees to meet a customer on the channel of their choice at any time via online chat or with expert contact center support. To optimize employee productivity, full enablement of the hybrid worker requires a permanent setup that ensures comprehensive access to all functionality and data.
To optimize the quality of work support staff can provide, enterprises need hybrid work solutions that deliver robust security while facilitating worker flexibility. Mitel’s MiVoice MX-ONE and MiVoice 5000 solutions allow enterprises to remain on their secure communications solution and, at the same time, provide every worker or customer care agent with the flexibility to work on-site or remotely. Workers can either use the PC/mobile soft clients or their SIP desk phone from any remote home site with the same functionality and security setup.
Ensuring each hybrid worker has easy, full-function access to communication tools and data they need takes care of the hybrid worker productivity challenge. But what happens when a customer or supplier wants to reach them by phone? The MiVoice MX-ONE and MiVoice 5000 make it easy to locate any employee using the “one-number” approach. An external caller needs only one number to call to contact the worker wherever they are and on any device. The location of the worker remains completely transparent to the caller. With the MiVoice MX-ONE, that one number can be used by internal company resources should an event occur that requires a group of workers to be immediately notified. One call to a distribution of employee phone numbers can be sent in seconds and reach employees wherever they may be working at any given time.
It's All About Transparency
When both your customer base and your employee base are constantly moving, your business communications capabilities must become location independent. If any friction is caused by a change in device, location, or time zone, the continuity and dependability of the experience fall apart. With Mitel’s breadth of employee and customer communications solutions – powered by the MiVoice MX-ONE and MiVoice 5000 – friction is replaced with transparency and the focus is solely on the quality of service the customer receives.
Next up, we’ll tackle protecting your data and remaining compliant in an increasingly complex compliance environment.
