12 Communication Trends Worth your attention and planned action now

Some of you may have seen my blog in Vision 2 Mobile about the Avaya “12 Communication Trends for 2012“. The cool thing is that this continues to be a very hot and relevant set of topics for just about anyone who wants to quickly get a perspective on the top communication trends that they should be watching. Actually, I’d say that if you want to get ahead of the game you need to do more than just take in a perspective, you really need to take the next step and assess how these trends are showing up in your business and what the near term and mid range implications could be for you. I’m just as guilty as anyone when it comes to reading very interesting perspectives and thinking I’ll come back to that information sometime soon and figure out what I need to do.

So, here’s my tip, after you run through these trends, pick out the top 3 that are the most relevant for your business operation. Next, challenge your communication provider or communications consulting team to recommend 3 near term things that you should consider in order to take advantage of these movements within the communication industry. Trust me, you’ll already be way ahead of the average person who tucks this away and then wishes 6 months from now that they had a plan in place.
For 2012, we came up with these top 12:

1. Mobility raises the expectation of availability: The pervasiveness of mobile apps and devices, coupled with access to the breadth of business applications, will change both consumer expectations of businesses and company expectations of employees.
2. Contact centers test the value of voice: More companies will calculate where voice communications fits into their value stream, from pure cost to revenue generation.
3. Contextual data spans the last mile of personal productivity: “Meta-information” will accompany voice, video, chat and text communications to provide fuller context for interactions.
4. Businesses advance from social media to social business: More businesses will question and demand that the value of their social media activities be quantified and routinely measured.
5. Social interaction and customer care enter into an arranged marriage: Promotions and customer service are the top drivers of consumer engagement through social media, so businesses will need to build new linkages among marketing, sales and customer care.
6. SIP rises (again): Early adopters have completed implementation of, and captured initial ROI from, SIP-enabled infrastructure; to get to the next value level, they’ll begin deploying SIP-enabled applications.
7. Social interactions expose customer care flaws: You can’t fake being “social,” so more companies will reinvent their customer engagement models to be able to quickly and effectively respond to customer care issues via social media.
8. IT support staffs converge, part 2: Many companies merged their voice and data support teams with the advent of Internet Protocol (IP) telephony; with the deployment of UC applications, more organizations will splice their applications teams as well.
9. Continuous connectivity drives communications support services: Communications support increasingly will involve proactive problem resolution via secure access links and live interaction via innovative Web environments.
10. Clients take control of managed services: As IT departments better understand best practices in infrastructure management, they will become more discriminating in how they buy services, fully expecting transparency and full accountability from service providers.
11. UC managed services/outsourcing aligns IT with business units: More business units will demand that IT departments outsource communications so that services are better aligned with their needs.
12. “True” UC apps proliferate: IT departments will be compelled by business units and enterprise users to adopt more user-centric applications and devices.

One of the hot areas that I’m hearing about is the paradigm shift within service support. As we know, along with the introduction of new technologies and cool applications come the concerns about supporting these new capabilities. Speed has always been a concern and will continue to be important. There’s a shift now towards more personalization of service support and ensuring that support resources are cross-trained to have more breadth and depth across your entire solution components. Wondering if you’re seeing support move in that direction or are some of the most fundamental support needs still posing a challenge for your support teams?

However you slice it, the pace of change, pressure of customer demands and innovation will be unparalleled.

I’m curious to know – what support issues are creating the most nagging headaches for your business? What’s your plan on how to get started now by capitalizing on a select few of these trends that are most relevant for your business?

Any stories to share on what’s working well for you?

Diane Royer is senior marketing manager of Avaya Client Services. Her focus is directing thought leadership for Avaya Client Services and integrating services into Avaya solution launches. Diane’s more than 30 years of business experience includes telecommunications marketing, sales and field operations.  A native New Yorker, Diane holds a master of business administration from Adelphi University and a bachelor of business administration with honors from Baruch, City University of New York.