Seamless collaboration, automation and safety are growing stronger.

We learned in 2021 that shifting to hybrid work is a strategic business move that keeps organizations competitive as the relationship between employers and employees continues to evolve. It’s also been critical to implement a seamless workflow to better serve the demands of customers through a remote experience.

Even those who were technology holdouts drove the trends seen in 2021. As a result, the expectation for a unified, personalized online experience has intensified. With so many more remote workers, enterprises have moved the majority of their IT systems to the cloud, allowing everyone to have the same access.

Enter a new breed of IT service providers, the Cloud Communications Service Provider (CCSP). NWN Carousel, a leading CCSP, helps enterprises procure new devices, adopt video collaboration services, update their support network, ensure security and work seamlessly on a unified communications platform. As many as 89% of our surveyed customers says they are looking into 2022 to plan for a more effective hybrid model.

“Companies now have a real need to be built for business continuity with resilience and agility. When you say hybrid work, they need to be able to have the ability to move remotely at any point and operate a continuous, sustainable business. We see a lot of that acceleration with our customers, which is not new, but moving towards a hybrid work model and to more automation is new,” says Krystina Silva, NWN Carousel EMP Vice President. 

With the understanding that a digital transformation will only speed up next year, what do NWN Carousel experts feel you should focus on?

“Fifty-six percent of US consumers believe that companies should have figured out how to handle pandemic-related disruption by now. Fifty-eight percent of consumers expect companies to have marshalled their digital resources so they’ll be able to respond better if the country plunged into another public health emergency.”

Forrester Research

Read below for installment one of our NWN Carousel 2022 predictions! Stay tuned for segments two and three.

1. Visibility is Key to Digital Transformation

Visibility into people, process and technology is essential in 2022. It allows you to get in front of everyone, and every system, you are managing. This will boost productivity and help manage supply chain disruptions.

Examples include collaboration and monitoring tools, cloud-enabled work environments for the hybrid workforce, zero-trust security models and new remote support offerings.

“We learned this remote thing works. You can actually be productive. We can continue to deliver the services such as secure access and the right collaboration tools.   Employees don’t have to commute. I think we will see more users expect a good collaboration experience to be part of what work looks like in the future,” says Alvaro Riera, NWN Carousel UC Vice President.

Employers are reevaluating where they look for talent and where they find resources. Ensuring all components of your technology are integrated and work well together, allows for execution of a global workforce, easing the strain on staff shortages, while also enhancing the employee user experience. Hybrid work requires a user-centric approach designed around the worker. These challenges can’t be solved with a single product or offering.

“Our challenge is to help customers move from barely being able to support hybrid work – to empowering it. Our UC Offering provides a user-centric collaboration platform that leverages best-of-breed collaboration solutions and provides a seamless administrative and user experience – powered by our Experience Management Platform,” says Alvaro Riera, NWN Carousel UC Vice President.

Benefits of User-Centric Collaboration Platforms

• Seamless access to applications and high-quality collaboration tools

• Maximize employees’ engagement, empowerment, and well-being

• Ensure all types of workspaces deliver simple, smart, and secure work experiences

• Support the many different workstyles & tools by deploying a clear vision

Alvaro Riera, NWN Carousel UC Lead

Looking ahead: Meetings will not go away. 98% of meetings will have at least one remote participant. Even if the majority of participants are in a smaller huddle room, remote users need to equally collaborate. 96% of employees expect the office space to look different. Employers will need to better attract, and retain, workers by providing intelligent experiences that truly improve productivity!

2. Applied Artificial Intelligence & Automation

With short to mid-term supply chain struggles continuing into 2022, organizations are going to be budget constricted and forced to do more with the same or less spend. Focus will shift to cost savings and cost avoidance, with return on investment once again being more prevalent,” says Kevin Basden, NWN Carousel Contact Center Vice President.

In the contact center, the transition from simple IVRs to intelligent virtual assistants, and AI, will be an upward trend in 2022. Consumers are comfortable with virtual assistants through home-use, and we’ll see a rapid adoption in the business world. Automation will also enable more Customer contact with the same staffing and same level of service. 2022 will be the first year of the contact center of the future, where data and experience blend to provide hyper-intelligent customer contact.

“Contact centers are very much about the customer experience and how to improve it. It’s very common that that an organization wants to implement automation or artificial intelligence for their customers, but they want to retain a personal experience.

NWN Carousel helps improve self-service and automation without sacrificing the customer’s experience”

Kevin Basden, NWN Carousel Contact Center Vice President

Organizations now understand they can save on training budgets while improving the customer experience by leveraging AI to augment their human staff. The concept of “Agent Intelligence” or “Super intelligent” agents has recently become popular.

Looking ahead: Organizations will lean more on their technology partners to implement and maintain these complex solutions. They will concentrate more on being a “user.” With the complexity that’s on the horizon, it will be more important to have a strategic cloud contact center platform partner.