By Al Castle, Vice President, Product Development for Flowroute, now part of Intrado 

The global workforces' ability to collaborate remotely is being tested in a variety of ways. This has forced many businesses and schools to cease normal operations and instead operate from a distance. In a recent survey, 52 percent of employees said their workplace restricted travel or asked them to work remotely at the start of social distancing recommendations in the U.S. in mid-March. This percentage has likely increased as evidenced by the increased demand for cloud-based collaboration solutions. 

These recent occurrences feed into larger remote working trends, in which 70 percent of people globally work remotely at least once a week. Given the current environment, communication service providers (CSPs) must be ready to help enterprises integrate cloud-based communication tools that will foster engagement with minimal disruption to standard business operations.

True collaboration means having the ability to connect anytime, anywhere. But legacy communications systems were never designed to meet that need. In response, CSPs have been taking a second look at their offerings to power the growing remote workforce. For example, Intrado offers a variety of tools to facilitate conferencing and collaboration among global workers. It's solution, Unified Meeting 5, for example, delivers remote meeting capabilities to enterprises and contact centers. As customers continue to demand flexible and global interactions, businesses are realizing the benefits these modern communication offerings have over traditional legacy telecom services.

Within the past month, we have also seen an increasing number of organizations and businesses turn to tools like West Cloud Contact Pro, Cisco WebEx and MS Teams to power their new remote and global workers. Conferencing and collaboration tools, and other UCaaS options, help teams stay organized and connected by providing real-time updates and better ways to store and share large files. Further, cloud-based collaboration tools that integrate communication capabilities allow employees to work on documents or other data types simultaneously, across many locations, while also having the ability to call, message or video chat throughout the project.

While cloud collaboration tools enable employees to be nimble, flexible and productive, organizations are going through growing pains as they reevaluate how to stay engaged and assess performance at a distance. Cloud-based video conferencing solutions can ease these pains and boost productivity for remote workers by connecting them with team members face-to-face, as if they were still in the same office together.

As millions more people discover how they can remain productive and engaged working from any location, organizations will have a better understanding of how existing jobs can embrace remote technologies to collaborate.

One vertical that's uniquely positioned to thrive in a remote setting is contact centers and customer service representatives. For example, banks and telehealth professionals are receiving a higher volume of calls. It is important that these businesses and organizations have the tools they need to handle the calls and keeping their workings safe and productive. With robust cloud-based tools, customer service and support representatives can deliver quality care to customers, while remaining connected to their team members.

Investing in cloud-based communication technology pays off. With recent upturns in the remote workforce, it's fortunate that recent evolution in remote collaboration technology has helped ease the spike in remote workers. While there will continue to be growing pains during the adjustment and new tools will be presented, there are a host of options currently available to meet business' needs.

Integration is key to not only efficiency and productivity, but also when it comes to providing support for remote workers. Giving remote workers the tools they need to collaborate in real-time and leveraging platforms that make that as simple as possible allows team members to get on with their projects and meet their deadlines, while adding value to the company's bottom line.

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About the Author

 

Al Castle is the vice president of product and engineering at Flowroute, now part of Intrado. He brings more than 15 years of operational experience in software engineering and B2B SaaS platform management. Prior to joining Flowroute, Castle was the director of engineering at Motorola Solutions, where he built and launched the organization's first SaaS platform and IOT enterprise software system in less than five months.