Transforming Business Communications | Daniel Yin, Head of Product & Innovation EMEA, RingCentral

A frank and general discussion around the continuous emergence of UCaaS, why it’s important now, how it will continue to be an area of particular importance for organisations and why it’s a tech segment ripe for innovation.

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Communications in the Cloud – 00:01:19

Communications is probably the last of the core business infrastructures to move to the cloud. slightly different to storage, or CRMs – communications relies heavily on real-time interactions. You can miss one or two seconds or minutes, of data transfer and still have a respectable system, but communications very much need to be real-time. So a slightly more complex technology in some ways. We found that the shape of businesses is changing in the UK in the last five years. There’s a lot more primarily, there are cost-saving and businesses changing their shapes. Smaller offices, more remote working. With that, you need a communications platform that is capable of dealing with these businesses. So things like remote commuting are very much enabled by a strong communications platform. So we’ve found that to be one of the strong drivers. Even with that, there’s still a relatively low penetration in the market, something like 10-odd percent. Even with that, with a strong shift, there’s a lot of room for growth.

Catering for a diverse and global workforce – 00:03:20

It’s interesting, it’s challenging to build something for ordinary workers. Whether it be disabilities or remote working scenarios. The other piece we’ve found is global and regional localisations. While it’s acceptable to build consumer applications in a single language, single locations – when you’re looking at worldwide businesses and enterprise, very few of them don’t have a presence globally. If you think of outsourcing use cases, remote or external development teams. You need language localisation in those regions, you need to comply with telephony regulations, so it’s quite challenging. It’s challenging to package all those things up in a single cohesive product.

Embracing emerging AI tech – 00:05:34

What we’ve found very strongly, the contact centre is the landing ground for good and sensibly applied AI and machine learning technologies. One of the other things we’ve seen, it’s very glossy for a company to talk about its AI strategy, everyone needs a strategy. It’s often quite difficult to translate those ideas into real business objectives and deliverables. A contact centre is great because it’s ripe for automation. A lot of simple tasks like answering a call, directing a call are very easy to automate with AI tech. A lot of that exists today. We see an extension of that in the next few years at least, not just having voice interactive agents, but fully digitised and automated AI-based chat agents as well. One of the journeys we see is simple escalation from, machine learning allowing an automated agent to seamlessly escalate to something that a human can manage. Especially in cases where they would need to deal with something quite complex which may require emotions, human-based emotions to handle. Making that experience simple, seamless, you take care of the easy first-line messaging, then you escalate that quite neatly through to human agents.