Recent research from Bandwidth's Enterprise Communications Landscape has found that more than 90% of IT leaders find managing their communications systems challenging. The study looked into the challenges that approximately 1,000 IT leaders across the world face, uncovering that the majority (56.5%) are managing between two and four carriers, while almost one quarter of respondents are managing five to nine carriers. On top of all this, 49% of respondents are managing three or more UC and CC platforms.
It’s therefore no surprise that amidst all this complexity, fewer than half of IT leaders feel that their communications solutions are meeting their needs. This is highlighted by the statistic that out of the average 364 SaaS apps used by enterprises, less than half are used regularly by employees, resulting in wasted resources. With projected worldwide spending of US 4.5 trillion in 2023, it’s clear that disconnected digital environments threaten enterprises’ flexibility, scalability, and UX. In addition, this is driving up costs.
A significant challenge is embedding interoperability into all of these disjointed applications. The survey revealed that 55% of enterprises have to enable more than four third party tools to interoperate with their communications stack. The most commonly utilised third party tools include call recording, messaging applications, voice transcription, IVR, PCI payment processing, voice biometric authentication, NLP, sentiment analysis and real-time coaching. However, ensuring these custom contact centre services interoperate across call flows requires careful analysis and is a great challenge to IT leaders.
The aim isn’t only to ensure interoperability for agents; the user experience is an even greater priority for IT leaders. UX is the number one thing that keeps IT leaders up at night. This is followed by cloud migrations, call reliability, and price point.
