July 15, 2022
The Enterprise Connect program team has begun work on the EC2023 conference, and I’ve been encouraged by how many of our conversations have focused on practical issues around ensuring the success of the migration to hybrid work and next-gen customer experience.
Hybrid work remains very much a work in progress and likely will remain so, as long as uncertainties persist about COVID variants, the prospects for a recession, and, probably most of all (and not unrelated), the balance of power between employers and employees. The path forward for the contact center/customer experience may be a bit clearer—just upgrade capabilities as fast as you can—but the success of these initiatives still depends on the skill with which the technology is implemented, as this recent No Jitter post by consultant Beth English of EE and Associates spells out.
Our discussions with the industry experts who drive the EC program have dealt with issues like the ongoing need for network assessment and troubleshooting in an environment where real-time traffic loads may vary or evolve as workers’ primary locations change. We’ve had conversations about the ways in which enterprises are still struggling with aspects of the UCaaS migration like number porting and data residency. And E911 remains an amazingly resilient topic; not surprisingly, having laws in place governing this critical capability have only increased and diversified the questions and issues that enterprises are facing as they seek to implement it.
Hybrid work is kind of the backdrop to all of this. There are a few areas of consensus about what hybrid work will require: Everyone wants meeting equity – so that all participants in a meeting come across to the best effect and can access both the information and the intangibles of human interaction to the fullest degree possible. There’s also agreement on the growing importance of security. There are loads of details to talk about on these and other issues where the aim is to keep up with hybrid work as it evolves.
At the same time, IT decision-makers in this space will need a strategic view of how communications/collaboration technology gets used as the decision-making process evolves.
I’ve written recently about how contact center decision-making is spreading out and, in some cases, moving to the highest levels of the enterprise. And on the employee-facing side of the communications/collaboration picture, strategic thinking increasingly means understanding the perspective of not just the business units but the facilities and HR organizations that share responsibility for creating a positive employee experience.
So while it’s still early in our planning process, I’m excited about how the ideas are shaping up. It’s a challenging time to be in IT, but we’re going to tackle those challenges head-on at Enterprise Connect 2023, strategically and tactically. We can’t wait to share the process and its results with you.
