Organizations are Revamping Their Approach to Voice: Should Yours?

Organizational voice strategies used to revolve around the handsets perched on employees’ desks or near their workstations. These physical devices aren’t going anywhere; however, the strategies around them have expanded as organizations look to incorporate a more diverse set of solutions and approaches. As it has throughout the IT stack, this pursuit has landed many in the cloud.

Projections from Synergy Research Group show that 68% of enterprise UC spend was dedicated to cloud resources last year. Go back just five years and that amount sat at less than half – 45%. Go back ten years to 2009 and just 31% of enterprise UC budgets was earmarked for the cloud. That’s an impressive swing over the course of one decade, clocking in at an average of roughly 16% growth per year according to Synergy’s researchers.

On-prem solutions have also seen growth of their own during this period. Synergy’s team points out that, at the individual product and endpoint level, on-prem solutions have continued to generate positive year-over-year returns. This seems to indicate the industry is trending toward a more hybrid, modern environment.

5 reasons organizations are rethinking their approach to voice

Forrester Consulting looked into the factors driving organizations to revamp their approach to communication. Here’s what the research giant observed as well as some of the statistical results reported by early adopters.

• Efficiency goals. Employees can’t operate at peak efficiency without the backing of a communication platform that does the same. Forrester found inefficient access to voice services resulted in, on average, 1.5 hours a week in lost productivity. Also, suspect call quality subtracted another 38 minutes of productivity each week. Modernizing voice can help counter those stats and ensure employees have access to on-prem quality voice services wherever they happen to be working from, putting valuable time back in their hands.     
• Budget moderation. Some organizations prefer the OpEx price structure of the cloud to the CapEx model associated with traditional infrastructure. Others prefer the opposite. One thing all organizations can agree on is a desire to reduce surplus expenses wherever possible. Forrester’s research concluded that, by leveraging the cloud as part of their voice strategy, organizations were able to reduce the amount spent on avoidable communication expenses. This included cutting international mobile roaming and long distance fees by more than $1 million over three years.
• Security and compliance demands. As we’ve pointed out elsewhere in this blog, security and compliance are not one and the same. They are, however, linked closely enough in this instance that they can safely share this bullet point. By integrating a leading cloud provider like Microsoft into their voice strategy, Forrester found that some organizations could more easily achieve compliance with information security standards like ISO 270001 or GDPR due to the provider’s own compliance.
• Management simplification. Collaboration environments have often been a patchwork of different solutions and vendors. It wasn’t always a guarantee that these disparate technologies would play together reliably. This has changed as technologies and providers have evolved. Today, organizations are able to utilize a lone provider for end-to-end collaboration solutions, covering voice, messaging, meetings, etc. However, they also have the option to lean on the partnerships forged between leaders like Microsoft and Cisco to take advantage of a new era of interoperability in the modern collaboration world.   

Next Step: Modernize your collaboration strategy

Modern workforces need the support of modern collaboration and communication platforms. Arraya’s team has the expertise and experience necessary to help your organization modernize its capabilities without forcing a total environmental rebuild. Instead, our team can help you optimize your current technological investments to ensure users have the tools they need to work closely together from anywhere. Strike up a conversation with our team of voice and collaboration experts today by visiting: https://www.arrayasolutions.com//contact-us/.

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