Five key trends that will impact Resellers in 2021

2021 will be different

2020 was anything but the year any of us expected. Predictions made in January seemed to have little relevance by March and vapourised by July.

So where should Service Providers, UC solutions and their Resellers focus to maximise revenue and opportunities in 2021?

While some geographies, notably Australia and New Zealand are returning to a degree of certainty, for many others, uncertainty remains the norm. What is clear are the growth opportunities that have accelerated in response to new customer and business needs.

1. Dispersed workforces + Proliferation of end-points = Shift from connections to mining the value in conversations and content

Workforces will continue to disperse, increasing the demand for unified communications and security solutions that enable Government and business to work across many endpoints. Remote work practices will continue to reshape work itself, accelerating adoption of Cloud solutions. And 5g will only add fuel to the fire.

Action: Service and Solution providers – and their partners – are seeing continued strong demand for UCS and UCaaS platforms. And targeting those opportunities is the first step to underpinning growth. The second step is to develop solutions that answer broader needs for compliance, security and productivity.

Unified Call Recording is central to developing these solutions – moving Resellers from simply selling connections to delivering value from multiple and dispersed end-points in the Cloud. That value ultimately will come from ending not knowing and providing insights into every customer and employee interaction.

1. Big Data + Voice Data = Bigger Big Data that’s compliant

Voice interactions with customers and between employees either rank first or second as a form of communication. And yet they account for a fraction of the Big Data pool accessible by most businesses. The moment the conversation ends, the value within the content is lost.

2021 will see a rapid shift to capturing voice data – driven by the new economics of Unified Call Recording and the Voice Intelligence Cloud aggregating conversations as data from any end-point.

Action: To take advantage of this rapidly emerging multi-billion dollar market opportunity for Voice data as a Service (VdaaS), Service and Solution providers – and their partners – need to present UCR as an integral part of the UCS sale and a key ingredient for compliance, business continuity and improving customer experience.

Default call recording solutions associated with many VOIP products typically don’t meet Enterprise-grade data and security policies or satisfy regulatory requirements. Many only store recordings for a limited time, offer poor transcription, and do not offer any form of speech analytics or voice data AI. Dubber Unified Call Recording and voice data intelligence is compatible with most VOIP products, and can be added without the need for any further hardware.

1. Ecommerce Acceleration = Need for continuous intelligence

Ecommerce growth rates are now in high double digits with nearly every business under pressure to accelerate digital transformation with the aim of improving customer experience. But to improve customer experience, businesses need to shift to continuous customer intelligence.

Action: Service and Solution providers – and their partners – integrating Unified Call Recording and Voice Intelligence into their UC offerings are able to differentiate, offering businesses the pathway to continuous intelligence from every customer conversation. Rather than reporting on NPS or customer satisfaction at the end of a quarter, customer experience – along with sales, marketing and agent performance can be made available in real time. And through open APIs, that data can be used to fuel dashboards, via applications such as Salesforce.

1. AI + Voice Data = Better Decisions

By 2030, AI products will contribute more than $15.7 trillion to the global economy. The use of AI to analyse and predict human behaviour will become standard practice for businesses looking for trends across their business in customer experience and behaviour, churn reduction, cross-selling and marketing.

Up to 90% of a company’s data is defined as unstructured. Traditionally this type of data, particularly phone calls, has been difficult to capture and analyse. Dubber AI solves this by providing the ability to analyse voice data for sentiment analysis, keyword identification, and transcription – enabling companies to draw on this data to drive strategy and decision making.

Action: Shift to presenting AI-first solutions that automate the delivery of continuous intelligence from conversations. Critical use cases such as compliance and creating records of crucial conversations are an imperative for every regulated business. But the benefits don’t stop there.

By looking for AI beyond the conversion of voice to data, solution providers can show how that same data can be used to provide a productivity edge and improve data overall.

That same data is as valuable internally as it is externally to measure employee performance and sentiment across the distance of remote working. Businesses can also make use of voice data to provide transcripts of meetings to teams, saving on note taking, and creating further efficiencies.

1. Distance + Increasing Regulatory Scrutiny = Compliance Complexity

Demands by Regulators to Know your Customer (KYC) and a shifting data and privacy landscape is creating a growing demand for complete solutions to answer needs for rapid investigations, continuous compliance reporting and voice data management.

The UK’s exit from the EU will mean that the GDPR will have major implications for European businesses who process or store data in the UK. Businesses who operate within the European Economic Area (EEA) and record their phone calls must check that their protection of voice data is sufficient for a post-Brexit world.

Action: With the increase in UC communications, and the resulting level of data being stored in the cloud, Resellers will need to understand the data laws impacting the collection and storage of conversational data. And solutions that lower the cost and burden of compliance reporting through real-time search, alerts and notifications are vital.

If 2020 wasn’t what we were expecting, 2021 is shaping-up to deliver as many surprises. Service and Solution Providers, and their partners, can ready themselves to turn change and uncertainty into opportunity by focusing on the shifts and creating the solutions to answer the needs they surface.

Voice data is central to creating these solutions as businesses increasingly turn to it to drive their decision making, predict customer behaviours and guide business direction.