The workforce in 2021 – are you prepared?

As businesses of all shapes and sizes reached for the nearest technological lifeline, we saw a plethora of collaboration tools being adopted but often without the necessary long-term strategic direction required when considering this type of investment. It’s a certainty that not everyone will remain a home worker but there will be a huge increase in work from anywhere technology. Here are some of the trends we can expect to see over the course of the year:

A move away from just allowing people to talk to each other and instead enabling true integration and enterprise mobility. For example, integrating different communications platforms so users can seamlessly talk to colleagues, customers or partners. With back end business processes this will be a case of creating the same level of operation utilising more cloud services whilst spending less. For many businesses this will require them to confront some of the blockers which have been facing them in relation to cloud, whether those are around security, privacy and criticality of data or in adhering to regulatory compliance.

With ‘social distancing’ now in everyone’s vocabulary, meeting rooms will become less densely packed. Many workplaces will look to accelerate the process of creating smaller focus spaces in lieu of larger meeting rooms. As a result, most participants will now remotely join meetings, meaning many more devices will be used to facilitate the video conference. Team-working applications, content collaboration and document sharing will become more prevalent with teams no longer crowded into that same room. Contactless technology such as wireless sharing and content annotation will reduce physical touchpoints in meeting spaces. Essentially the new behavioural patterns we have all adopted will drive innovation in meetings.

2020 drove everyone into their homes and into the place where consumerisation rules the roost. With staff being sent home this ethos has now been brought into the corporate world more than ever. Whilst your staff suddenly had to work from home, so did your customers. Engaging with buyers now means reaching out to people at home, in whatever creative way you can.

Many organisations struggled with maintaining customer service operations with everyone at home, so it became easier to shut them down and revert to email only. This is something which we will see change dramatically in 2021 as organisations enable their business with more channels of communication. Where previously it was a phone number, there will now be online chat and automation with bots, artificial intelligence and machine learning to drive innovation and efficiency. The key to differentiation in 2021 will be through the excellence of your customer service.

SMEs in particular could face real challenges here as they try to navigate the new corporate landscape. They must now contend with a workforce largely based from home, engaging with an increasingly distributed customer base, whilst trying to protect against a barrage of attacks focussing on remote working vulnerabilities.

We may see businesses split into two broad categories – spenders and savers. Bitten by 2020, businesses who struggled may look to reduce spending and cut costs as they fight for their existence. Others who flourished or have a more aggressive strategy may look to spend their way through the uncertainty. For technology resellers and integrators there will be a challenge around identifying which one your customer thinks they are, and which they should be.

The result of all this is that the channel businesses which will prosper in 2021 are those embracing change, focused on integration and striving to deliver a greater customer experience. With the huge increase in consumption of various cloud collaboration systems, now the work begins on getting them all talking to each other. From a voice and video communications perspective this is where the channel will really make their mark. Furthermore, across all markets we will see an increase in spending on retaining customers from a marketing and operations perspective. Organisations who can focus on this and have effective processes around customer experience and customer success will see the greatest returns.