Now more than ever, organisations across the public and private sectors depend on seamless, secure, and high-quality communications. Even with an increasing range of channels having established themselves in recent years - including voice, email, video, and SMS - voice services remain a key part of how we communicate and collaborate.

Now more than ever, effective collaboration and communication are the keys to success. Throughout 2020, we saw a widespread shift in how we interact with each other, both in and out of work, and how we stay connected to our colleagues and customers. Just consider the following:

With the current global situation, the past week has shown the importance of being able to create the Digital Workspace to provide flexible working solutions for your workforce. 

I decided to write a blog around how Microsoft's Teams, a Unified Communication as a Service (UCaaS) solution, has enabled my productivity to not slip despite the whole of my team now having to work from home thanks to Coronavirus.

Twitter, WhatsApp and other means of consumer service technology are becoming part and parcel of communicating at work alongside Unified Communications (UC) technologies. As a result, the boundaries between our work and personal lives are becoming increasingly blurred.

Global broadcasts place incredible demands on infrastructure, which must offer the performance and resilience required to accommodate the anticipated spikes in viewership. Exponential-e has worked closely with a number of world leaders across the broadcasting and media sector, providing fully integrated solutions that ensure their connectivity is of the very highest quality, freeing their own teams to focus on the broadcast itself, safe in the knowledge that they can completely depend on their technological foundation, no matter how many viewers around the world tune in.

Over the course of the past year, the contact centre has been changed forever, with social distancing requirements meaning that familiar methods of face-to-face contact are now unavailable. In light of these shifts, social media, video and email contact are now regularly utilised as the primary channels for customer queries – a trend that we have seen on the rise for some years now. Between March and November 2020, we saw a significant update in the use of online channels, with 54% of organisations reporting an increase in email contact, 52% reporting an increase in social media, and 65% reporting an increase in the use of web chat.

Microsoft Teams has been in the ascension for some time now, rising exponentially in popularity throughout 2020, to the point it is now the default internal communications tool for many organisations, with the distributed workforce utilising it to effectively collaborate with colleagues on a day-to-day basis.

With the flexible office model slowly but surely supplanting the traditional working environments in favour of dynamic co-working spaces for a number of years now, we have seen many organisations reconsider the way they think about commercial real estate.

The past year has challenged the UK's education sector in ways that would previously have been inconceivable, with children learning from home the majority of the time since March.

Even as the end of lockdown approaches, it is clear that hybrid working is here to stay, with organisations utilising remote and office-based working on a flexible basis, in order to combine the advantages of both.

Failure Demand: "Demand caused by failure to do something or do something right for the customer"
Seddon, 2003

Here's why that's a good thing…

"In the new contact centre, we're no longer reliant on hunt groups, and can onboard new services and new desks very easily, which has allowed for a much higher level of agility in terms of how we connect and collaborate with our colleagues and partners. We've also got a much higher level of control, so we don't need to go through our IT teams to make changes or updates when we need to, and can constantly refine our call flows."

Stacey Whyte, NHS Digital