Making the dragon year work for businesses

A symbol of success, power and good luck, the dragon is the most distinguished animal in the Chinese Zodiac. True to the spirit of the dragon, 2012 promises great intensity and room for companies to lead and grow. At the annual Avaya Connect Asia Pacific Channel Partner Conference in October 2011, 90% Avaya’s channel partners predicted a stronger year for their businesses in 2012 with 47% forecasting strong single or double digit growth.  

 

In looking at the top communication trends of the coming year, Avaya highlights 5 tips for companies that can help businesses stay ahead of the curve in the competitive year of the dragon:

 

According to Frost & Sullivan, 2012 will see social media being widely integrated into businesses. More and more companies are looking for clear and reliable quantification of the value of their social media activities.  

 

Common social media tools not only bridge business processes, but complement consumer-to-business interaction and vice versa. It is therefore essential for companies to be adept at navigating through the social media noise by developing and delivering a clear and comprehensive message.

 

To make this possible, companies must ensure that social media becomes a channel that is tightly integrated to its communications architecture.  One tool that can help companies with this is the Avaya Social Media Manager (SMM), which scans and analyzes events from various social media channels using intelligent engines efficiently and automatically processes them to further integrate interactions with customers into the existing Avaya contact center framework.  

 

With the planned release of more smartphones, and with tablets and mobile devices now being made available on intelligent operating systems like iOS, Windows Phone, and Android, we see a greater influx of tools and consumer devices in 2012. Businesses will see a rise in the Bring Your Own Devices (BYOD) trend.  

 

The bottleneck for businesses is no longer access to information, but the ability to connect people together with the right information at the right time. It is all about driving faster collaboration, smarter decision making and achieving better business results.

 

With the explosion of devices, tools and communication channels it is essential for organizations to be able to manage and channelize communications in a manner that can help achieve real-time business collaboration in a single user friendly platform. Desktop video devices available today are equipped with real-time office collaboration tools that deliver context-sensitive mash-ups of chat, email, social network and video communications — all tied with a common look and feel regardless of device. Enabling consumer devices with the same business application is key to driving productivity and employee engagement.