Vox Content Strategy

1. Todays collaboration requirements go far beyond meetings and internal messaging.

2. Advanced features built on artificial intelligence: UC and CC vendors have been using artificial intelligence (AI) to create advanced capabilities. Legacy systems don’t have the processing capability to perform AI at the scale necessary to deliver advanced services such as facial recognition and analytics.

3. Investment protection: Almost all companies have invested in some kind of on-premises solution, and most are not ready to retire their existing platforms yet. Finding a way to gracefully migrate from the old to the new while maintaining the investment is important to most CIOs.

4. Understand that collaboration is evolving. Technology is moving very fast, and the meetings of tomorrow are changing just as fast. For example, meetings never used to include mobile workers, but now this is the norm. Video used to be a rarity, and now it is commonly used. Choose a platform that you know will evolve as meeting requirements change.

5. Be cautious offree orlow-cost vendors. A common axiom in IT services states, “You don’t get what you don’t pay for”—and that certainly applies to online meetings. Many vendors offer extremely low-cost or free solutions, and these may be appealing because of their price and the perception that significant money will be saved. However, low-cost solutions are often missing critical capabilities for businesses such as those discussed earlier. A low-cost vendor might be the right solution, but businesses should do their due diligence and understand how that vendor plans to fund research and development, what kind of support it offers and how strong its solution road map is. Only providers that continue to innovate and evolve their solutions will be able to meet ever-changing market needs and customer expectations.

6. Customer communication demands have changed and legacy infrastructure introduces friction in being able to meet those needs. Added costs, inefficient headcounts, and lower CSATs come as a result.

7. Innovation without chaos: Shifting from an older legacy platform to a new cloud service will bring many new capabilities but can create an IT management headache. Managing the old systems along with the new ones and keeping policies and features consistent can be very difficult.

8. Workforce disruption: Transforming the way people work is necessary to compete in the digital era. However, new tools and capabilities can be disruptive, as users need to change the way they work. It’s critical that any tools brought in have minimal impact on the workforce.

9. Complexity of existing collaboration tools: Most businesses have multiple collaboration tools to provide calling, meetings, video, team messaging and other functionality. Trying to tie all of these systems together at a management layer is difficult, if not impossible—particularly if they come from different vendors.

10. Graceful transition: Businesses need the flexibility to transition to the cloud over time using a cloud hybrid model that provides cloud innovation now to meet workplace transformation objectives while productively co-existing and networking with on-premises PBX estates.

11. Choose an end-to-end vendor. Collaboration is too important to piecemeal a solution together. Buying point products, particularly cloud solutions, means the end user often must be the integration point. Instead, choose a vendor whose solution can deliver any collaboration function to any worker using any type of deployment model.