The top 5 communications challenges that impact customers and employees

February 13, 2024 Austin Herrington 3 min
Summary:

Communications challenges can negatively impact employees, customers and business operations in their wake. Here are the top 5 challenges and how to overcome them.

Communications disruptions can stop work in its tracks. Everyone has experienced lagging audio or a dropped video call that has derailed a meeting. These challenges have become critical in emphasizing the need for consistent collaborative tools to perform daily business operations.

Many organizations are quick to admit that they’ve experienced technology challenges that directly impacted their customers and business operations. And according to a recent Gartner report, these challenges extend to employees as well: “Organizations still struggle to provide/create an equitable technology experience for all employees, creating gaps in employees’ performance and engagement. Continuing with existing legacy tools, processes and organization will prevent cost optimizations and limit agility and growth in the future.”

This year, we will see these top 5 challenges impacting customers and employees most:

  1. Dreaded network downtime: Employees are relying on virtual meetings to communicate with clients and customers. When there is network downtime—often a result of legacy voice services—that has a huge impact on negatively impacting customer experiences, and decreased productivity across employees.

  2. Here, there, remote work everywhere: The sheer number of physical locations on their firm’s network creates a strain on its operation. The proliferation of remote workplaces of individual employees constantly struggle with connectivity and the lack of communications technology tools inhibits work from getting done efficiently.

  3. Security is in question: Today’s dispersed workforce has exposed a gap in endpoint security. IT decision makers agree that they are more concerned about security for hybrid and WFH employees and this vulnerability is not an issue that will likely ever go away.

  4. Multichannel communication preferences: With the influx of the next generation of workers having strong preferences towards chat and SMS as well as video companies must adopt a communications platform that can seamlessly enable multi-channel communication in a frictionless interface.

  5. The missing piece: A lack of resources, such as user training and the right tools, and shortage of IT talent across teams are major roadblocks to performance and can prevent organizations from getting the most out of their investments.

Investments for the future of work

IT teams recognize the growing importance of modern, cloud-based technology like Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) to properly support effective employee and customer communications. Whether hybrid, remote or in the office, unified communications tools have a growing importance. According to Gartner, by 2025, more than 65% of workers worldwide will avoid joining hybrid meetings from a formal conference room, instead choosing to join meetings digitally from their own desk or office. Organizations are adopting a unified approach that integrates their cloud-based workplaces to address challenges that help employees to get their jobs done, while keeping costs low.

Adopting UCaaS with secure SD-WAN can remove obstacles in communication, support better work and give you a competitive edge. These solutions can increase user adoption of tools and vastly improve customer engagement. Together they provide a more flexible approach to delivering a collaborate-from-anywhere solution, with greater security, productivity and reliability.

See how Windstream Enterprise can support your UC and voice needs by visiting our website.

Learn more

Key Takeaway
As organizations look for ways to support the accelerated nature of remote work, tech investments like UCaaS are key to avoiding major communications challenges.

Transforming the customer experience in retail with CCaaS