With all the trends Soluno has seen on the rise during the COVID-19 pandemic, Patrik Sorqvist, Group CEO, Soluno BC, said that contact center technology is on a path for perpetual growth. The trends he's seen in collaboration, remote work, and workplace communication have been visible for a while. Sorqvist noted - they got kicked into overdrive by the pandemic. "COVID-19 caused organizations to revaluate the experiences they present to customers, end-users, everyone," he said.
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Patrik Sorqvist[/caption]
Mobile-first propositions are on the rise across Europe, although he notes that they are slower to come to market in the UK. Most of the demand for contact center technology this year came from the US. COVID-19 gave a boost to this notion in most countries, making enterprise leaders conscious that the path to the cloud is not linear but perhaps more nuanced than they might have thought.
The most prominent changes to come, according to Sorqvist, will be in the way enterprises do business due to the rapid pace at which companies became obsolete during the pandemic. For some, it came down to 'adapt or die' in a matter of months. This was at least for those not willing to shift their critical communications to the cloud or those who did not adopt a hybrid approach.
In the UK and Germany, Sorqvist said that Soluno helped new and existing customers speed up their digital transformation strategies in a matter of days in some cases - despite global lockdowns that acted as an agent of change and one of the key drivers for how we provision communications technology moving forward.
"Today, if you want to deliver good customer service, it often means doing so without manual touch, meaning that you need to digitize your customer journey. This is one of the many reasons Zoom gained so much popularity during the pandemic"
Digital First is the Wave of the Future
Looking back, this could be why some of these companies had security issues, Sorqvist argues. He added as they did not have the security knowledge required to handle an influx of new users at the beginning. The express goal, trying to grow their user-base.
As such, Sorqvist maintains that there is a new focus shifting from features. "We're in a mature market now, indicating the winning proposition comes down to how natural you make it for partners to install your technology." Self-service portals and automation are also here to stay from this point out, as it is no longer time-friendly to sit and learn manual processes.
