New Mindsets that Will Immediately Boost Your Productivity

To no surprise COVID-19 has forced organizations to provide communication solutions and offerings that address today’s challenges and ensure resilience. While many companies know that this is a need more than ever, migrating IT workloads can seem cost prohibitive due to the time and challenges most organizations face when trying to do all the work internally.

Challenges can compound when the migration includes mission-critical data, infrastructure and moving to the cloud. Since there is no single method for all sizes and types of cloud migration, you can significantly bolster your chances of cloud security success by leveraging best practices, well-executed plans, and partners with experience.

Steve Brock, Avaya OneCloud Marketing Leader, recently wrote a great article about the four new mindsets Avaya has noted that have enabled customers to maintain and even increase their workforce productivity during these challenging times.

1. Moving From Products That go Obsolete to Ensuring They Drive Desired Business Results

Ensuring your organization is able to innovate with needs rather than budget dependency is what drives modernization. Ensuring your cloud products and services have the ability to do the following will help guide you to the right service provider:

• Deliver scale, migration and tools that support organizations of any size
• Provide full enterprise and blended stack between the front- and back-office and across multiple devices for multi-modal experience
• Deliver new outcomes that are seamlessly adopted with existing environments and opportunities to innovate at the edge with open APIs
• Unmatched ecosystem of channel and technology partnerships
• Offers the most comprehensive and flexible set of consumption and deployment models for any size of enterprise – public, private and hybrid
  
  

2. Viewing the Home as the new Branch Office

The shift to working at home has been especially dramatic for customer service agents, from 3% primarily working from home to 34% in the U.S. according to Avaya research. Over half of the agents not working from home say it is either because they cannot do their job from home or their employer hasn’t provided a way for them to work from home. Avaya CMO, Simon Harrison, recently shared some great perspectives on this at Remote AID 2020.

Employee Experience (EX) is one of the greatest factors of Customer Experience (CX). Gartner research states “The quality of the employee experience affects all aspects of work: performance, engagement, retention and even attraction of talent.” When employees are working from home, giving them the same tools and capabilities that they have in the office helps to maintain their productivity. Studies show that 46% of employees say Avaya devices increase their productivity and 30% say they increase their customer service capabilities. And Avaya customers are avoiding large up front devices cost by simply adding them to their subscription.

It is important to note that hackers also work from home, and they can cost your business millions. According to the US Council of Economic Advisors, attacks related to ransomware have caused damages worth almost $1 billion. U.S. users have paid over $25 million worth of ransom. Businesses can use a cloud subscription model to keep their software current to address critical security risks. Keeping software current also helps to avoid the potential business disruption of customer-impacting outages that can take significant time to resolve.

3. Shifting From Video Conference to Collaborative Work Streams

The use of online meetings is skyrocketing and has become critical for the Employee and Customer Experience. Avaya primary research shows that video conferencing has increased for 67% of home office workers and for 57% of all workers since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. This research also shows that many home workers are struggling with their video meeting tools – and this is impacting their productivity.

Conversely, many home workers are actually increasing their productivity during these challenging times by moving from focusing only on “video conferencing” to the more constructive and results-gaining motion of creating and leveraging “collaboration workstreams.” Gartner expects the collaboration app market to nearly double by 2023, and this was the view prior to the current global crisis.

4. Moving from Reactive to Proactive Customer Communications

Proactive customer support means predicting customer issues and addressing them proactively. It is about identifying and fixing customer issues before they become big problems. A recent study by Inside Intercom showed that with over 600 support leaders revealed that 78% of support leaders want to move to a more proactive support approach. However, only 26% are sure they have the knowledge and tools to do so.

Before you can truly understand what your next move should be, schedule a Cloud Workshop with ConvergeOne and allow our cloud experts to guide you using best practices to ensure you have a clear vision and strategy to execute your cloud journey.

Learn more about Understanding the Real Cost of Your Business Phone System in our latest ebook here.