“Businesses can track and engage customers across multiple communication channels with accuracy, measuring engagement effectiveness and collecting & acting on real-time feedback.”

Today, the spread of devices & applications has increased the complexity of the IT infrastructure, forcing enterprises to adopt newer technologies and enhanced capabilities. Telecommunication continues to be at the focal point for disruption, growth and innovation, delivering continued momentum and increased collaboration with newer technologies and applications, such as: Internet of Things (IoT), automation and surveillance solutions, accelerating critical enterprise decisions and analytics.

In the coming days, evolving communication technologies would present tremendous growth opportunities for the enterprise telecom sector. As increased number of verticals, mainly the SMBs are expected to be key contributors to this rapidly emerging scenario, organizations would eventually move away from proprietary hardware-based network equipment to open source based functionalities, which would allow them to afford and deploy greater processes and manage their enterprise communications more efficiently & effectively.

Organizational growth, use of converged networks and new enterprise applications, will keep up with the demand in the coming days. With the maturity of communication standards, extended opportunities will open up for mid-size enterprise applications as omni-channel applications are getting integrated in the core areas of enterprise IT environment.

Smart device utilization and connectivity of devices would continue to expand, paving way for increased convergence, while service providers, equipment companies, open source telephony solutions and device manufacturers, will be critical components of this ecosystem. Year 2017 would witness more intelligent customer assistance & service delivery and enterprises would continue to upgrade their communication infrastructure platforms and adopt advanced integration features. Here are two key shifts to keep in view:

Enterprise Connectivity

In the next few years, surveillance would continue to evolve and integrate with enterprise communications infrastructure, mainly the IP PBX, while delivering exceptional control and monitoring capabilities. Powered by open source telephony platform to ensure compliance with SIP-based protocols, there will be seamless integration of IP PBX with surveillance devices like: CCTV cameras, security sirens, intercom, door sensors and other access control equipment’s. This would make all surveillance solutions extremely easy to install and manage, while creating room for augmentation, scalability and future expansion.

Surveillance integration with IP PBX would further help secure IT assets and other stake holders, through engagement of multiple communication channels with utmost accuracy, while delivering response in the realtime. As organizations combine their security set-up with the existing communications infrastructure the surveillance application gets integrated with existing IP/Ethernet networks, thereby saving huge costs, as it eliminates the need of added hardware and new infrastructure. The addition of IoT devices for monitoring & control and establishing seamless enterprise connection will be the key transformation for future.

Work Force Optimization

Customer driven insights and technology aligned to business processes will be the fundamental approach to enterprise strategy in the coming years. An essential and upcoming wave of change for the enterprise communication will be the emergence of IP PBX as the centre piece of work flow automation application – built on open architecture, that connects various enterprise IT devices, captures, analyses and derives actionable knowledge from customer interactions.

With real time analytics, businesses will be able to detect critical experiences, e.g.; contact centre employee behaviour during customer interaction, quality of customer engagement and help them analyse quickly. Businesses can track and engage customers across multiple communication channels with accuracy, measuring engagement effectiveness and collecting & acting on real-time feedback. The derived analytics would assist in identifying and resolving bottlenecks in enterprise processes and workflows, eventually improving team’s performance. This disruption also opens doors for organizations to, new opportunities; reduce costs and errors; however success is also dependent on a robust business process layer mapped to clear workflows.

The Way Ahead

The telecommunications industry is transforming fast to offer a broader set of services with flexibility to adapt to customer’s communications requirements and market opportunities.

Apart from this; reduced costs of hardware and software along with upcoming demands from developed markets will push large scale deployments. To address this wide spread phenomenon, open source technology and application providers are gearing up to serve the communications needs of this evolving ecosystem consisting of diverse users, cutting edge applications and all forms of devices. To enrich the coherence, creating greater value, the next few years would witness more intelligent customer assistance & service delivery and enterprises would continue to enhance their core infrastructure platforms with advanced communication tools and integration features, as the customer engagement continues to remain a paramount objective.