Beyond the cloud: the new order of business

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While this growth is impressive, it shouldn’t be surprising. Moving to the cloud dramatically simplifies infrastructure, removes impediments to change, improves security, and allows for the collection of massive amounts of data for analysis. Most importantly, however, it facilitates experimentation, rapid change, and easier adoption of new technologies.

So, while the cloud offers inherent benefits, it’s also just the first step on the road to the new order of business. This is the point where the real business revolution begins.

Multimodal interactions

Beyond the cloud, businesses must meet customer demand for multimodel engagement, where they can use multiple channels of communication within a single interaction seamlessly. An example is escalating from a web chat to a video session with co-browsing.

Collaboration technologies

Increasingly, customer engagement and collaboration technologies will merge. The above example illustrates this capability. Another is the ability of agents, along with business users, to be members of subject-specific chat rooms. Being able to quickly tap into a resource such as this would enable agents to far more effectively address customer issues in real-time.

Virtual reality

Virtual reality is another area that’s transforming business. Imagine agents and customers walking together through virtual worlds to exchange information, demonstrate complex concepts, or showcase goods and services. As part of a multimodal interaction, the customer experience becomes deeply personalised and effortless.

Artificial intelligence

We are already moving beyond data analytics to artificial intelligence (AI). AI automatically and proactively identifies problems and recognises trends so supervisors don’t have to search through enormous data sets. This knowledge will drive disruptive change in products, services and customer engagement.

The cloud presents a wealth of as-yet untapped opportunities to completely disrupt business and society at large. The question now isn’t whether or not to embrace change. For businesses that want to succeed, the only question left is how fast can you do it?