Richard English, the Director of Strategic Consulting for Avaya’s Professional Services did an interview recently discussing Avaya’s top trends for 2013. For the last four years Avaya has talked about their predictions of future years trends. Below is a summary of the trends they talk about:
Simplified Complexity Drives the Agenda
With all the advancements in technology, things have gotten a bit complicated. Especially when trying to make everything work together smoothly. Richard says that the new goal is going to be to consolidate these processes and simplify things. Keep the same terrific functionality, but collapse the levels into a single common infrastructure.
Video Changes Business and Customer Expectation
We all know Video conferencing has been around awhile, so it may seem a strange prediction or trend of 2013, but English has a different view on it. Video conferencing has become very easy for users at home with Skype, FaceTime, Tango, and other programs or software on mobile devices. So why hasn’t that ease of use traveled into the corporate world? We hope to see setup and “click to call” style video conferencing become more prevalent in corporate environments.
Real Time Analytics Help Fine Tune the Customer Experience
Social media is more than just a fun (or stressful) way to waste time. Businesses have found them to be a useful tool to keep in communication with their customers and receive feedback. They can backfire however, if not monitored or responded to properly. An unused social media profile is worse than none at all. Analyze the content from various post and comments can help companies figure out what their customers wants and needs are, and can improve customer service.
Businesses Face the Private
I struggle to understand how their title is fitting of their explanation, but basically this trend falls under “moving to the cloud”. As more companies move to the cloud they will find that some applications require that they have some private in house hosting, where others will allow for completely public facing connections.
Communication Support Goes Pro-Active
Like the first trend says, things are so complicated now, we are looking forward to a time where devices are smarter and Service Providers are more “Pro-Active”. Instead of waiting for help desk, who in turn is waiting for the Vendor response, which is waiting for the specialist, all just to get back to you on a problem; wouldn’t it be better to have devices or service providers that could fix items before you knew they were broken? That’s the idea.
Managed Services Hit an Inflection Point
Companies are hitting a point that they are going to have to ask, should I move this service to the cloud? Should I have a service provider do this for me or pay my own staff to take care of it for me? Having to make the choice to continue managed services or move them to the cloud is a very tough one that many companies are going to have to make in 2013.
Mobile Muscles In
Avaya spokesman Richard English states that this relates mostly to the deployment of Unified Communications. He says that in 2013 he sees mobile devices having all the applications and abilities that you get from unified communications. Not just phone or emails, but video and data and everything else.