What is keeping our customers awake at night for 2014?
What is keeping our customers awake at night for 2014? by Roberta J. Fox
At FOX GROUP we help enterprise and government clients develop strategies, as well as acquire and implement next generation communications technology including unified communications, telephony, network and contact center technologies. We also provide guidance to the industry on what products and services they should sell, bringing the customer voice so that the clients technology investments deliver real, sustainable positive business results….sort of like a customer advocate.
The last three years have found tremendous advances in telecommunications technologies as systems are moving from digital systems to IP-based, and now converging with IT applications such as email, presence and desktop video.
These solutions, once properly designed and installed have tremendous potential to improve how people communicate, disregarding location or type of device. From our own evolution to our third generation of IP-Based communications within FOX GROUP, we have found there are some potential issues that keep us awake worrying about our clients challenges in moving to next generation IP-based communications.
1st Trend - Cloud 2.0 – Ongoing Vendor Resource Challenges
Enterprise customers are starting to invest in various types of UC and cloud solutions, but customers and vendors are struggling with a few areas.
 |
There are too many technology solution choices and approaches, whether Cloud, customer premises or hybrid alternatives. This makes it difficult and time consuming to get accurate designs, deployment specifications, beneficial option choices and other details to be able to make an informed decision, let alone support, these next generation IP and Cloud-based technologies |
Putting it all together is not easy to do at all. There are very few vendors who offer all of the pieces required to totally move to cloud, based on our own implementation migrating to 100% IP-based communications running on Lync. We have seen many of our early adopter client pilot projects have similar challenges.
Once you get your cloud solutions implemented, it is difficult to manage and measure vendor deployment, service levels and performance.
These next generation solutions also demand an increased amount of comfort in using various computing devices and making changes to them as a user. Why do we say this? If you are using a PC-based VoIP like Microsoft Lync, and you are not using a hard phone, (only your PC with a Lync compatible headset/microphone), you need to understand how to change and control the computer speaker and microphone functions.
This is particularly true if you are going to use desktop video applications like Citrix GotoMeeting, with external speakers and have other people around your computer while on a voice or video call. This means you need to know how to change the Microsoft operating system speaker and microphone settings between a USB speaker phone unit like the Jabra GNM-PH500 and dual headset device like the Jabra B12 2500, all without cutting off the call!
Sometimes it is even difficult paying and managing invoices for converged/cloud technology solutions as most of them are pre-paid monthly against credit cards. If any of the due dates for services you are paying for are missed, payments are still deducted anyway, and then you have to spend an inordinate amount of time to get credits processed.
2nd Trend - Social Media for Business 2.0 – How do you know which applications to use?
Issues/concerns for Enterprise/Government Organizations
 |
Many businesses are struggling with how to effectively develop, manage, produce and leverage content effectively across multiple social media apps for the organization. Given the constant introduction of new social media apps, it is even more difficult to keep up with which ones to deploy, let alone why? No one seems to have been able to quantify and prove… what is the real business ROI? |
They are also trying to understand the internal LAN and WAN network impacts of these applications. Surprise….most of the application developers either don’t know or don’t want to tell the clients this type of detailed information.
Our enterprise customers are also challenged in how to manage all of the various hosted applications integrated together, while making sure their information is secure.
3rd Trend – How to have the right current skills, knowledge and processes to deploy and manage changing communications solutions
The replacement technology solutions are causing challenges across vendors, companies and users to design, deploy and support, disregarding whether they are cloud, customer premise, or a combination of both (Hybrid), due to a shortage of appropriate technology skills, knowledge and experience.
Many of our Enterprise and government customers tell us that they have job openings in their IT and contact centers and don’t have enough staff to keep up with the demands of technology support and projects deployment.
The technology manufacturer industry continues to reduce headcount in order to maintain positive financial results. Some of these resources have moved to channel partners, but the over-all effect has been declining customer service and much more challenging implementations.
Too many young people are continuing to stay away from high tech and engineering oriented programs across Canada and the US. This causes more pressure for resources on all sides.
Lastly, users across all generations are struggling to keep up with using different applications and devices, let alone learn the constantly changing skills required for new applications and services.
4th Trend – Vendors…Why can’t you tell us… What are the future communications skills required to use, deploy, and support your proposed future solutions?
 |
We all agree that the future is getting harder to predict, design and plan for, particularly as it relates to future skills required to design, deploy, support and even use continuously changing technology.
This is challenging across various generations, particularly given the accelerating pace of technology advancements. We encourage all organizations to look at creative, flexible job programs to help fill the technology openings.
|
Below are some creative alternatives to provide enough technology professionals, whether on the vendor or end user side.
-
Provide flex work, part time programs to leverage semi-retired resources, or sandwich generation employees struggling to provide support for aging parents.
-
Enable millennials to work flex time or part time programs so they can support their work/life balance/social oriented priorities.
- Develop job-sharing programs between experience baby boomers and millennials to not only cross-educate on new skills, but also enable knowledge transfer of institutional processes and programs.
These may be some of the best ways to ensure that both vendors and customers will have enough of the appropriate resources for all of us to buy, use and manage next generation converged communications solutions.
As always, I welcome thoughts and feedback on this and other topics. Feel free to drop me a note to , or use old fashioned way to connect via my hosted VoIP number to 289.648.1981 if you would like to chat about how we can help you sleep at night!
Good news is that if I am not around, your voice message will be translated and routed back to my email to be read on my smartphone, tablet, laptop or desktop PC anyway. UC technology is sure great to use!