Enterprise Connect 2019: Key insights from the first two days

There is an ever-present truism at the center of the cloud revolution: the way people work and communicate has changed to be more mobile, distributed, and global than ever before. But with revolution comes not only opportunity and benefit, but unique challenges to solve. In today’s organizations, employees are faced with too many disjointed point solutions that negatively impact workflow and customer satisfaction. Today’s cloud communications and collaboration providers must partner with enterprise IT to create optimal user experiences and workflows that reduce friction and increase employee productivity, customer satisfaction, and business profitability.

This requirement is at the center of the conversation at Enterprise Connect 2019. Here are three key takeaways from days one and two:

User experience drives the bottom line

Companies have treated employee and customer engagement as two different worlds — but they are inextricably linked. Customer-facing employees and customers both want and need a seamless communications experience that meets their needs. Customer-facing employees want to be productive to serve customers quickly. Customers expect quick and frictionless service, on any channel.

91% of customer-facing employees believe a seamless platform that lets them navigate between all the ways they communicate and collaborate with coworkers and customers would make customers happier, which in turn would drive greater employee job satisfaction and happiness.

IT leaders have an urgent need to become more agile and responsive in the ways they interact with employees and customers to meet ever-increasing expectations from both parties. This puts IT and business leaders under increasing pressure to deliver transformational user experiences for both customer-facing employees and customers to drive business productivity and customer satisfaction.

Features matter but dial tone is mission critical

The promise of unified communications as a service (UCaaS) is an expanding array of advanced communication and collaboration technologies that improve employee productivity. Advanced technologies are not the only need on the table. Businesses demand a UCaaS deployment that also delivers reliability, security, and scalability combined with excellent customer service and support

In the session UCaaS Bells and Whistles vs Nuts and Bolts, RingCentral’s Curtis Peterson shared real world examples to drive home the point that downtime is not an option, especially in industries like healthcare. Curtis said, “our attitude toward architecture is that dial tone is a human right.”

Technology and artificial intelligence continue to improve digital interactions

There is a growing ecosystem of AI companies integrating with communications and collaboration providers. Businesses are leveraging open APIs to bring the power of Artificial Intelligence (AI) services to their existing workflows. For example, businesses can capture timely customer data to drive greater customer engagement or leverage key voice analytics services to pull real-time snippets from a sales conversation to coach other sales agents.

Businesses are placing greater value on solutions that unify these disparate interactions and provide a unified experience for those on the frontlines of customer engagement. AI is a key ingredient in enabling a simplified and cohesive experience. And we saw the opportunity available today on display in both sessions and on the show floor. Partnering with Otter.ai, RingCentral’s Richard Townhill demonstrated the power of integrated voice and AI for real-time voice transcription in a theater session.

The onus will be on businesses to demonstrate how AI will be deployed to help their customers feel recognized and understood on every digital channel and solve their problems faster.

A highlight from day two was the RingCentral Midnight in Morocco Cocktail party held in the atrium. Attendees enjoyed a memorable evening of specialty drinks, themed food, music, and more.