Call Accounting Featured Article

Communication Focus Shifts from Devices to Experiences

  By Susan J. Campbell, TMCnet Contributing Editor

The talk around the telecommunications space is all about the importance of unified communications. We’ve seen the touted benefits surrounding unifying all platforms, but it’s possible that this only scratches the surface on what we should be paying attention to. Unifying platforms is one thing, but the real attention may need to be focused on the overall experience.

A recent App Tech News piece took this stance, suggesting that the focus needs to shift. In an era where call accounting is focused on streamlining communications to ease processes and control costs, it only makes sense to take a step back in the planning of your unified communications strategy. To accomplish this, it’s important to remove the distinctions between collaboration, communication and productivity.

In the process of building out this new approach to communications, our mobile devices won’t be the only smart phones we use. Desk phones will connect naturally to workplace applications. At the same time, workplace communication and collaboration tools can exist in the cloud. This movement will also take users away from text-based messaging and into file sharing and real-time voice and video calls without losing the context of an interaction.

To that end, companies are trying out team messaging or workstream communication and collaboration, a leaner and optimized method for sending quick group messages. According to App Tech News, this approach has proven to be the stickiest alternative to email the workplace has seen to date. Email has been able to beat back all challengers for years as the default communication method within the enterprise. And once the habit is established, it becomes easier to layer other, richer collaboration activities over the top, including calendar events, sending tasks, sharing files, launching online meetings and more.

The context of the communication is set by persistent conversations. Instead of an email subject line, conversations will instead be started around a particular company, product or project. The subject is always the same and the body of the message is always important. The tools needed to accompany the conversation can also be stored within the same stream, providing all users access to everything they need at all times.

The idea here is that the communication is all about the experience and very little about the devices being used. The focus is on streamlining the communication and making call accounting much easier to manage. Those making business decisions will have to worry less about the cost of communications and more about providing the necessary bandwidth to support the streams of communication.