12_Communication_Trends
- 1. Each year atAvaya we ask some of our leading thinkers to share their predictions for the important communications trends and developments in the coming months. Looking ahead to 2012, five of our top minds have offered insights into topics including social media, managed services and customer care. Here is a preview of the 12 Communications Trends for 2012, followed by some brief background on the prognosticators: The trends: 1. Mobility raises the expectation of availability — the pervasiveness of mobile apps and devices, along with access to the breadth of business applications, will change consumer expectations of businesses and employers’ expectations of employees. 2. Contact centers test the value of voice — more companies will calculate where voice communications fit into their value stream, from pure cost to revenue generation. 3. Contextual data spans the last mile of personal productivity — “meta-information” will accompany voice, video, chat or text communications to provide context for the interaction. 4. Businesses advance from social media to social business — more businesses will question and demand quantification of the value of their social media activities. 5. Social media and customer care enter into an arranged marriage — promotions and customer service are the top two drivers of consumer engagement through social media, so businesses will need to build new linkages between their marketing, sales and customer care functions. 6. The SIP is raised again — early adopters have completed implementation of, and captured initial ROI from, SIP-enabled infrastructure; now they’ll begin deploying SIP-enabled applications to gain the next level of value. avaya.com | 1 12 Communications Trends for 2012 Preview
- 2. avaya.com | 2 7. Social interactions expose customer care’s flaws — businesses can’t fake who they are in a “social” setting, because social interactions ultimately expose “the real you.” Some businesses will discover they aren’t portraying an image they prefer, so they’ll be compelled to reinvent what customer centricity is all about. 8. IT support staffs converge, part two — in many companies, voice and data support teams converged with the advent of Internet Protocol (IP) telephony; with the deployment of unified communications applications, more companies will blend their applications teams as well. 9. Continuous connectivity drives communications support services — communications support services increasingly will involve proactive problem resolution via secure access links and live interaction when necessary via innovative Web environments. 10. “True” UC apps proliferate — IT departments will be compelled by business units and enterprise users to adopt more user-centric applications and devices. 11. UC managed services/outsourcing facilitates alignment between IT and business units — as business unit demands increase at an even faster clip, more IT departments will adopt managed services/outsourcing business models to keep pace. IT groups that resist will continue to struggle. 12. Clients take control of managed services — as IT departments better understand industry best practices around infrastructure management, they will become more discriminating about the services they purchase, their expectations for transparency into those services, and how they hold service providers accountable. The trend spotters: Christian Goffi is a practice leader with Avaya Professional Services. He is responsible for our Caribbean and Latin American consulting team, is a social media strategist, and serves as the global program leader for social media consulting within Avaya Professional Services. George Humphrey is a director and line of business owner at Avaya. He is responsible for the Global Strategy and Product Line Management organization of Avaya Managed Services.
- 3. © 2011 AvayaInc. All rights reserved. Unless otherwise noted, all trademarks identified by the ® , TM or SM are registered trademarks, trademarks or service marks, respectively, of Avaya Inc. 12/11 avaya.com | 3 About Avaya Avaya is a global provider of business collaboration and communications solutions, providing unified communications, contact centers, data solutions and related services to companies of all sizes around the world. For more information, please visit www.avaya.com. Ajay Kapoor is vice president of customer service and North American field operations at Avaya. He leads a 1,700-associate team supporting Avaya customers across all technologies and geographies. Mike Runda recently joined Avaya as vice president of service delivery. He previously served as CEO of the KCS Academy, an organization focused on improving the customer’s support experience and support organization efficiency, and has led global support for technology companies including Intuit, Symantec and Oracle. Ravi Sethi is president of Avaya Labs. In this role he leads a thriving organization that conducts leading-edge research and works with real-world customer scenarios to accelerate product innovation and mitigate technical risk. Stay tuned for the release of our upcoming full white paper “12 Communication Trends for 2012” and our Services Thought Leadership Blog which will be discussing these trends and many more market impacting items.