Will COVID-19 be a catalyst for the digital transformation of enterprise communications?

Telecoms.com periodically invites expert third parties to share their views on the industry’s most pressing issues. In this piece Patrick Joggerst, CMO and EVP Business Development at Ribbon Communications, looks at how the current crisis may transform the way businesses communicate.

The Covid-19 pandemic is affecting people and industries around the world at an unprecedented velocity. While this situation is unprecedented and scary, we are seeing touching acts of kindness and a determination to keep going.

This is particularly true in our industry of telecommunications, which is fundamental to keeping society online and informed, as well as ensuring critical aspects of the economy can continue to function. For the majority of us who are currently not sick, maintaining our productivity at work in the face of this adversity is critical. It will support the economy both now and as things recover, and it will also help us to keep morale high during this period of prolonged isolation from our regular day-to-day life.

Countries around the world are now thinking about how to safely restart their economies, and telecommunications has a massive role to play. Businesses which had not been used to having remote employees have suddenly turned to our systems of communication and connectivity. We expect that many gains in comfort with these tools will be made soon, and smart providers are already seeing asking how they can  improve on what exists currently. Achieving this when there is so much uncertainty in the world will not be easy, but we are already seeing changes that will have a tremendous impact both now and in the future.

One obvious change, driven by the huge number of people now working from home or remotely, is an increase in awareness of the crucial role that communications technology can play in keeping employees engaged, customers served, and businesses running. Many businesses are now realising that they already have a solution that enables employees to seamlessly switch on and do their job wherever they have an internet connection. Others are quickly playing catch up. As a result, usage of platforms such as Microsoft Teams has risen rapidly in the effort to get as much the global workforce as possible online.

This shift in attitudes is especially apparent in the events industry – particularly in the tech and telecoms sectors – where there are questions around the future of major tech conferences in light of the cancellation of this year’s Mobile World Congress and many others. The cancellation of mass gatherings and face-to-face meetings is already forcing companies to ask whether we need to practice what we preach – ourselves included – and make significantly better use of the digital technologies that we produce.

We are realising that, at present, too many companies have no function to set up their employees from home, and those that do have too many different tools for communicating internally and with their customers. Be it email, chat or a video conference bridge, presently these tools are rarely connected through one, internet-based platform. The problem with this is that it makes communication clunky and it puts users off when things go wrong, thus preventing them from making the most of the technology at their disposal. With so many different applications being used by employees – which means numerous passwords, or in many cases the same password used many times – this also poses a significant security risk.

This need not be the case. Among the gamut of real-time communications technologies available to business in the 21st century – unified communications and Communications Platform-as-a-Service to name a few – there is the option connect all of the many tools that we currently use for communications and to organise them within one, centralised platform. This facility enables companies to embed real-time contextual communications capabilities, such as voice, video and chat, directly into their applications and websites, meaning a more seamless experience when interacting both internally and externally. This technology ensures that communication and the sharing of information can take place across multiple mediums wherever you are in the world with an internet connection.

This is not new technology, but right now we are seeing a catalysation of uptake in digital transformation of communications across many businesses – largely in the professional services sectors – as they are forced to find workarounds to stay online during the Covid-19 crisis. In ordinary times, these companies may not have invested in such technologies and while the catalyst for this investment is tremendously sad, we do believe that this shift to digital will have a tremendous and lasting benefit to business globally. When we emerge from this crisis, many businesses can and will be better for it, and that is something we can hold onto over the coming weeks.

Patrick Joggerst is the Chief Marketing Officer and Executive Vice President of Business Development for Ribbon Communications, a secure real time communications company. Previously, Patrick was EVP of Global Sales & Marketing for GENBAND. He has an accomplished career in communications spanning three decades, having managed sales and marketing organisations for both telecommunications service providers and technology suppliers. Prior to GENBAND, Patrick served as Vice President of Global Sales for BroadSoft. Patrick is a graduate of Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service.