What FMC benefits have you witnessed in 2020?
The events of the last year have really shifted the needle on FMC, and what can be achieved with it. It has taken a worldwide pandemic for organisations across the globe to implement UC suites that were previously further away in their technology roadmap or, in some cases, enable certain productivity features within their infrastructure they hadn’t previously allowed.
What’s been enlightening for so many this year is witnessing the benefits of a far more agile workforce that has had to make wholesale changes to working practices. These have had positive impacts for many businesses.
Our customers have shared some great results with us, including more engaged employees, increased staff retention due to better work/life balance, being able to work from anywhere, reduced costs in the areas of transport and the associated carbon footprint benefits - the list goes on.
The growth in FMC was always there – it’s just that the events of 2020 have accelerated the timetable for so many companies.
What are the most common challenges with FMC and remote working?
[caption id="attachment_32702" align="alignright" width="200"]
Sam Giggle[/caption]
Crucially, communication between company and customer isn’t the primary challenge with organisations who have made the shift to a remote workforce – it’s actually more about how employees interact with one another, both within their teams and when collaborating with other teams. So it becomes less about picking up an inbound call to a DDI on a mobile versus a desk phone, and more about how you bring others into the conversation, especially ad-hoc from any device, and then of course how you keep that conversation moving if you need to switch from one endpoint to another.
For a lot of companies it’s a clunky experience with forwarding rules, outbound dialling, and click-heavy keypad interactions. For that convergence piece to work it needs to be a fluid experience for the employee, enabling them to easily pull other people into existing voice and video conversations on-the-fly, whether they’re in front of a computer or on a smartphone.
Delivering an effective collaboration experience on desktop is one thing, but it’s a far greater challenge on mobile, simply due to the screen size limitations. As a vendor we have to remember that even with a remote workforce, endpoints still change throughout the day, and accessibility is even more important than it was before.
If the experience, especially on mobile, is poor then employees look for workarounds to simplify what they need to achieve. This is where the danger sets in, especially in regulated industries.
