David Lover

When it comes to planning for a remote and mobile workforce, a lot of companies are entering the second phase of their strategy, in which they are planning for a more permanent solution. The first phase was somewhere along the lines of, “This may not be the best approach, but we just need to get it done.” This included leveraging a lot of free temporary licenses, which typically had 30-90 day expiration dates, so they now need to figure out what’s next. At ConvergeOne, we’ve been having a lot of conversations about permanent solutions with customers. It might be because these customers think the “shelter in place” orders will be getting extended longer than first anticipated, but it might also be because people are seeing firsthand the value of enabling a remote, mobile workforce.

I’ve been spending a lot of my time talking with customers about remote worker strategies. Most are sending their employees home to work. As I discussed in an earlier blog post, for some customers it’s a very easy, short conversation (i.e., those that have already adopted a mobile-first strategy). For others, that discussion is a bit more involved. Customers who find themselves behind the 8-ball are not looking for a long, strategic, vendor-agnostic conversation. They want to know what they can do now. So, when conversations go that direction, it’s time to roll up the sleeves and dive into the tactical weeds. They don’t have time for a rip and replace. They require a vendor-specific conversation, that can include layered cloud services on top of their existing platform.

I’m always a little surprised when I meet with a company that hasn’t embraced a mobile-first philosophy when it comes to deploying its unified communications (UC) solutions. What does it mean to be mobile? We all know mobility is important. Once you have it, you really can’t imagine life before it. You know the saying: Work is what you do, not where you go. Obviously, this doesn’t apply to every job function, but a lot of information worker-type jobs can be done from anywhere.

The past few weeks have been interesting, as several customers have inquired about how to best prepare for a health pandemic. Within this same period of time, one of our industry’s largest conference, HIMSS (Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society), cancelled its conference (with 42,000 registered participants) due to concerns about COVID-19, commonly known as coronavirus. Clearly, our industry—and society as a whole—are paying attention and investigating next steps for dealing with this outbreak.

While voice authentication is now a hot topic, it is not a brand-new concept. Traditionally, voice authentication was used purely as a way to replace a user’s password. It was a very manual process to establish your voice password (today, we’d call that “active enrollment”), and you were limited to very specific ways of using it (typically a challenge-response model).

Do you have omnichannel projects that just aren’t moving along as fast as you think they should? What are the hurdles getting in your way? I’ve yet to find a scenario where it’s the technology that’s slowing things down. Don’t get me wrong, omnichannel isn’t easy. It’s a very different approach to customer contact than traditional call centers or even multichannel contact centers. Omnichannel is all about customizing the journey of the person (or thing) trying to interact with your business. First we need to understand what the customer journey actually looks like. This is often a lot harder than it sounds. Most people in a company know their little piece of the customer journey, but very few can articulate the details of the full, beginning-to-end journey. This often requires a lot of exploration, business-level interviews, multi-disciplinary teams, and documentation.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a hot topic right now. Unfortunately, when a topic is hot, I find that many people throw around the term without really having a good understanding of its details. That’s where our teams within ConvergeOne kick into gear, working to understand those details. As we researched AI, one particularly relevant use case became obvious: chatbots. In fact, Gartner calls chatbots the current face of AI and predicts that by 2020, more than 50% of large enterprises will use product chatbots. Let’s dive into the details of AI within the context of chat.

ConvergeOne recently announced the availability of ConvergeOne Secure Connect, our new software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) managed services offer. In a nutshell, Secure Connect is a subscription-based, fully-managed SD-WAN that connects our customers’ networks to ConvergeOne Cloud Experience (C1CX) collaboration solutions. I know what you may be thinking: What is SD-WAN? It’s one of those terms that we’ve all heard of before, but few know what it really is, and why it’s a hot topic. Let’s dive a little deeper into SD-WAN and explore why Secure Connect is such a cool offer.

Omnichannel is a big buzzword when it comes to one of the latest trends in contact centers and customer experience. I’m hearing a lot of vendors, partners, and even customers initiating the discussion. I get really excited when people bring it up, but sadly, I very quickly get deflated once I realize everything they’re talking about is actually just multichannel. So, I thought I’d take a look at some of the big differences between the two.

Fourteen ConvergeOne thought leaders presented at Avaya ENGAGE 2019. They'll be sharing highlights from their sessions in a blog series over the next several weeks, so check back for the next installment.