Several factors are compelling businesses to adopt cloud-based communications services, including unified communications (UCaaS) and contact centers (CCaaS). From an initial investment perspective, decision-makers are choosing OPEX over CAPEX for consistent monthly expenses and invoicing. In addition, the constant flow of enhancements delivered from the cloud, and the ability to outsource operations to expert providers rank among the top adoption factors.
UCaaS and CCaaS services provide users with access to a range of communications modalities, spanning voice call control, video conferencing, presence management, chat, team messaging, and short message services (SMS). Such software-based applications enable these various communications modalities to dovetail into business workflows and processes through APIs, such as sales and marketing, calendar and scheduling, human resources, employee training, and customer care, to deliver next-level value.
Due to the benefits of cloud communications services, adoption among end-user organizations continues to grow. An early 2023 global Frost & Sullivan survey of IT/Telecom decision makers found:
65%, or more, of organizations have adopted or plan to adopt cloud-based IP telephony, video conferencing, team spaces/group chat, and multi-channel contact centers at various levels by the end of the year and planned further investments over the next two years.
However, the growing use of a wide array of communications modalities can create new challenges in dealing with privacy and compliance concerns, which already ranks as challenging by 85% of technology investment decision makers. Whereas yesterday’s communications environments primarily required recording and archiving of voice, email and fax interactions for compliance, today’s environments also add video, chat, SMS, and team messaging to the equation.
Next-level Benefits of an Integrated Communications Platform
Customers and employees will leverage their favored modality of conversation, dependent on available channels, situations, audience and type of information or content to be conveyed. Today, this can be in the form of voice calls, SMS, chat messaging, video meetings, email, or a mixture of them, based on customers’ or employees’ preferences. Having a solution that covers all these modalities with UCaaS and/ or CCaaS provides the flexibility for an organization to meet their users’ and customers’ needs. As soon as a particular modality begins to be used to transact business, the ability to retain all communications channels becomes that much more important. The communication provides a great deal of knowledge, IP, and contextual insights, and therefore substantial value can be derived from these interactions.
Unified cloud recording, archiving, and search capabilities are a prime example of a solution poised to help organizations reap more business value from their investment and protect the organization. Intermedia Unite Archiving collects data across all the communications modalities to provide necessary compliance capabilities and address today’s and tomorrow’s use cases by structuring and analyzing multi-modal communications data. It aligns with the broader future-proof approach to cloud communications investments that advance organizations toward business process transformation and optimization.
Many organizations view Archiving as a solution to only help protect and enable the business. Drivers include:
- Regulatory compliance, a MUST HAVE in – Financial Services, Healthcare, Insurance, Government, and others.
- Internal HR and policy clarification requirements to avoid “he said, she said” misinterpretations in disputes.
- Potential litigation and e-discovery needs.
Such use cases are all valid, however Archiving is not just a solution to help safeguard businesses; it can create opportunities to derive more value from communications interactions by identifying trends and validate feedback, subsequently increasing revenues, efficiencies, productivity, and competitiveness.
As organizations broaden their communications technology investments, there are a multitude of logistical benefits to be gained from an integrated cloud-based communications stack that is delivered from a single provider, such as: streamlined solution sourcing and vendor management; improved support accountability and SLAs; common integration and security frameworks, and often discounted pricing due to volume spending. These benefits are part and parcel to provider sales and marketing pitches today and should be expected of nearly any cloud communications services investment. But truly integrated cloud communications enable data to flow across applications for next-level business benefits.
Cloud Communications Archiving as a Data Intelligence Platform
With reliable access to unstructured interactions data there are opportunities to take advantage of multimodal business communications sessions to make more informed decisions and help generate revenue and increase efficiency to reduce overall operational costs.
Data-driven insights: Workflow bottlenecks and best practices can be identified to streamline operations and increase efficiencies in internal processes. For example, data-driven insights can help identify high contact center inquiry rates for certain products or services. Those insights can inform decisions to create online FAQs that increase customer self-service information and reduce the call volume burden on agents.
Training and coaching: Identify areas of focus and improvement for employee training and quality assurance. Sentiment analysis from both customers and employees can help refine and improve coaching/training processes and associated content to increase engagement, safety, best-practices, as well as organizational culture and process alignment.
Knowledge Management: Easy to use, yet comprehensive communications data search and retrieval functionalities help customers retain institutional knowledge and more easily transfer that knowledge amid potentially disruptive employee turnover, time off, role changes, mergers and acquisitions, and more.
Sales and Marketing: Leverage analytics and sentiment analysis to equip sales staff and agents with most of the appropriate information at different stages of sales and support interactions and throughout the marketing pipeline. Increase overall customer experience.
The opportunities are endless and today, organizations have benefitted from analyzing their communication data, such as transportation and logistics, professional services firms (legal, accountancy, consultancy, etc.), auto-dealerships, hospitality and leisure, recruitment, governmental and local authorities, and more.
Infused with Artificial Intelligence, Intermedia Unite Archiving addresses these use cases and a growing range of others, limited only by technology development advances. Additional and future use case concepts are addressed through co-creation among Intermedia and its ecosystem of customers and partners.
To learn more about what your organization can achieve with a future-proof archiving solution visit Intermedia Unite Archiving.
