IT leaders were sent scrambling recently—in the wake of COVID-19—trying to support work-from-home (WFH) initiatives and a “stay at home” mandate from state and local officials. As a result, in order to retain their employees, some organizations allowed them to work from home, knowing full well they were not equipped with the tools to do so and, therefore, wouldn’t be working much. Their WFH initiatives essentially amounted to a glorified paid-leave policy. Now they are moving to furloughs.
Other organizations with employees previously armed with laptops sent them home to work. They worked, but still had little to no ability to chat or audio-video conference. These same organizations either had to “let it alone” or hastily roll out conferencing and collaboration solutions, such as Zoom and WebEx, to their newly indoctrinated WFH workforce.
Some laptop-armed-WFH employees diligently put their heads down and went to work only to be kicked out of premise-based applications due to a lack of bandwidth and/or VPN tunneling. If you thought the cloud had moxie before, you better hold on to your socks now! Which brings us back to UCaaS and the new playbook for WFH.
(Register and attend this CCaaS Webinar and receive a $15 gift card)
Cloud Communications Gets Even More Moxie
The playbook for providing remote capabilities to sustain business contact between employees and with customers, suppliers and partners will forever be changed. From here on, IT leaders will constantly be asking themselves, “does my workforce have the right tools to ensure constant communication between themselves without being in direct proximity with each other?”
With UCaaS, the answer will be a resounding, “yes.” Fundamentally, UCaaS is a cloud-based unified communications platform that provides voice, chat, and video/audio/Web conferencing capabilities. All done in a secure environment from any type of device, anywhere.
(Check out this UCaaS refresher.)
Here is a quote from a “mid-market” ATC client last week referring to the current situation, “Last fall we went with Vonage Business as our UCaaS solution. With COVID-19, this allowed us to pivot and quickly become completely remote when stay-at-home orders were put into place for our company.”
Coincidingly, IT leaders with contact centers will constantly be asking themselves, “does my workforce have the ability to support our customers and suppliers though a direct channel as they work remotely?”
And, with CCaaS, the answer again will be, “yes.” Cloud-based contact center software provides direct customer contact to deliver vital customer experiences through intelligent routing of inbound communication across various channels. Agents are equipped to communicate with customers via voice, chat, and social media channels on any device, anywhere, anytime.
(Check out this cool infographic on UCaaS, CCaaS and Security.)
Here at ATC
Fortunately, for the past ten years, ATC has been increasingly leveraging cloud-based services, including UCaaS. Mostly to take advantage of our own mobility and the capability to work anywhere, anytime. But also, in the advent of unforeseen circumstances such as those we are experiencing today with COVID-19. Within 24 hours of “stay at home” order, ATC announced to clients and partners via email, “as a cloud-based, mobile-ready firm, we are, at present, 100% work-from-home and 100% operational.”
We have been working feverishly over the past three weeks to make sure our clients can claim the same. We have helped clients – large and small – migrate to new solutions that would typically take 30 to 45 days, and doing it in less than 24 hours. In less than 2 weeks, ATC has assisted over 10,000 employees to begin working from home seamlessly.
Why ATC Can Help
Successful digital transformations such as Unified Communications as a Service start with ATC. When you’re faced with a tough decision and there is no margin for error, you can count on ATC’s innovative expertise and proven approach to sourcing and implementing next-gen services. Positive outcomes await.
Contact an experienced ATC technology advisor today and let us help you make a difference. You can also download a free copy of Unified Communications as a Service for Dummies to make an informed decision on unified communications for your business.
