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.

 

 

From a market perspective, we are seeing a more demanding customer base. Business owners should expect a more demanding customer service experience for their organizations, especially when customers insist on a complex cross-touchpoint service – that is, as Forrester puts it, the ability to start an interaction in one channel, and complete it in another. Furthermore, customers are craving a greater alignment of service, sales, marketing and brand in order to interact with the company in an unbroken manner.

 

The Avaya 2011 Contact Center Consumer Index survey showed that consumers today are less forgiving with as many as 87% of respondents likely to tell their friends and switch to competitors on receiving poor customer center service.

 

Customer service now requires a horizon of devices and communication support to fulfill an evolving end-user experience. Many current contact centre solutions which have proven useful in the past are unable to provide a consistent experience for customers across communications channels let alone support the kind of multi-modal, simultaneous voice/multimedia interactions.

 

There is a need for a change in the architecture to one that is designed from the ground up to support multimedia, multi-modal communications – a solution that is media agnostic and easily able to adapt to new contact types as they emerge. In order to be able to catch up with newer technologies, Avaya believes that technologies that support multimedia and multi-modal communications using a wrap and embrace methodology will be beneficial as companies plan for 2012.  

 

Cloud computing brings to the table a new dynamic standard that removes technological complexities by enabling on-demand, self-managed virtual infrastructure that can be used as a service. As more businesses embrace the broadening spectrum of cloud resources, they will have to adapt to working with different cloud solutions and providers – opening a floodgate of opportunities for service providers to leverage on a fluid and integrated management of the cloud resources with greater business agility and lower costs.  

 

Whether it is your existing data centre or a new one, cloud based data centre solutions should take full advantage of the available solutions from a multitude of vendors, integrating with traditional IT systems whether it be hardware, software or virtualization seamlessly.  

A cloud-based system should also be able to shield the backend complexities from an enterprise user. End users of a cloud-based service should be able to manage their own data centre, create and use its own templates as well as access and store information on its own.  

 

Skyrocketing data consumption continues to drive industry headlines as both consumers and businesses are discovering new ways to develop, store and use data. To remain ahead of the curve, providers must also consider ways to improve network stability, security and performance while reducing costs.  

 

Taking the network virtualization across the enterprise from the data center to the enterprise campus network is going to be very important to help relies the power of Cloud. Open Standards like SPB or Shortest Path Bridging 802.1aq have added virtualization capabilities and an enhanced version of IEEE Shortest Path Bridging gives enterprises the option of extending their enterprise applications and services across the network — from the data center to the network edge.