The Use of Technology to Prepare for the Return to the Office

During the first stage of thepandemic, employees were quickly transitioned to work from home while organizationssimultaneously got their remote office infrastructures up and running. Many didnot anticipate work from home to last this long, and some are still in a semi-permanentworking situation hoping for a return to the office as part of the new normal.As the pandemic has been progressing, we are quickly learning that the way weworked in the past, will not be the way we work in the future.

So, what will the future ofwork look like when we return to the office? To start, more workers than evermay be working remotely for an extended period of time, which introduces a newset of challenges and opportunities for organizations. It is very likely that thereturn to work will see a mix of remote and in-office workers, and solutionssuch as cloud meetings, unified communications as a service (UCaaS) and contactcentre as a service (CSaaS) will be the way of the future. Other trends we'reexpecting to see are:

Increased adoption of collaboration tools on desktops and mobiledevices

Whether we're in the office or at home, we still need to collaborate. In order to ensure that employees who are working from home have the same capabilities as those in the office, it is crucial to have a platform that is agnostic of location, which is why cloud-based platforms like Cisco WebEx, Microsoft Teams, Zoom and Ringcentral and 8x8 will become our standard collaboration tools for the future. With the integration of bot technology, you are now also able to interact with your cloud services through these tools as well.

In addition to these toolsbeing the new common area for socializing and collaboration, most desk phones arelikely to be replaced by apps on our laptops combined with any headset ofchoice. We anticipate this change due to the increase of people who will be workingremotely, or switching between the office and home, making desk phones lessconvenient than an app that can move with you. These apps will become be ourcommunication hub that would host our meetings, calling, chat and teamcollaboration platforms and some organizations may utilize more than one tomeet their day to day collaboration needs.

Due to the shift tocollaboration tools over desk phones, we will also see a continued increase in videocollaboration. With employees working from many different locations, it will beless and less likely that meetings will be held with every attendee in person,so we expect to see a rise in video collaboration during meetings as a way forcoworkers to meet face to face. Video collaboration also allows attendees tosee visual cues when communicating and to see how engaged meeting attendeesare, two things that are potentially lost with the lack of opportunity to meetin person.

Less strain on organization's resources

With employees working remotelyand using their home Wi-Fi services, there is less strain on organizationalresources and an increased demand for better services at home. With workersneeding a more reliable internet connection, faster download speed and internetfor remote communities, we will likely see a rapid expansion and adoption of5G.

In addition to the decrease inuse of organizations' internet services, we also expect to see a reduction intheir real estate. We estimate that many of us will not return to the officefull time, not because people are afraid, but because organizations arerealizing that a lot can be done while people are at home and that they don'tnecessarily need to be in the office to do their jobs. Since employees won't beworking from the office every day, we may see more people moving out of thecity and to more remote communities in search of more affordable housing.

New uses forvirtual reality and virtual assistant tools

For both employees on site andworking from home, we expect that virtual and augmented reality will becomeincreasingly popular as organizations put more focus and effort towardsemployee experience. One example is virtual assistants, which are increasing inpopularity in meeting spaces. For instance, Cisco WebEx Assistant for meetingrooms allows meeting users to walk into meeting spaces and start or schedulemeetings with voice commands. This experience leverages existing technologieslike Natural Language Processing, Text to Speech and Speech to Text to passcommands to the meeting room device and to get responses from it, which is thesame technology used by Siri, Google Assistant, Alexa, etc.

Another use case for virtualassistants is for taking meeting notes. The WebEx Meeting Assistant will transcribewhat is being said in the meeting whilst highlighting who said what and when.At the end of your meeting, you are provided with the meeting transcript andthe highlights as captured by the WebEx Meeting Assistant. Microsoft Teams alsooffers this option, however, users need to record the meeting and turn onclosed captioning. Teams also has the capability of translating betweenlanguages which is very beneficial for global organizations.

Live support is the third usefor virtual assistants that we expect to increase in the new normal. ServiceNow'sVirtual Agent is a great example of this, as their platform allows organizationsto design and build automated conversations that allow users to obtaininformation, make decisions and perform common tasks, such as get tech supportor ask HR-related questions.

Rapid adoption of Contact Centre as a Service (CSaaS) platforms

The shift to remote work willalso bring the move to the cloud for many organization's contact centres, alsoknown as Contact Centre as a Service (CSaaS). With the introduction of CSaaS,we will see a lot of growth and integration with machine learning and the adoptionof AI, which will allow contact centre agents to work from home. By hostingtheir contact centre platforms in the cloud, organizations can adopt quickly toremote work requirements and take advantage of the latest and greatestinnovation in the contact centre technology space.

As mentioned, we expect agrowth of adoption of AI technology in this space, which will allow businessesto serve their customers better and provide a great experience for them whenthey interact with customer support. A popular use of AI technology is theintroduction of virtual agents. These virtual agents rely on Natural LanguageProcessing (NPL) to identify customer's intent, sentiment and mood to ensurethat the customer is engaged throughout the service. Virtual agents also ensurethat there is a smooth transition to a live agent if the need arises withSpeech to Text (STT) and Text to Speech (TTS) technology. AI also provides liveagents with customer insights to ensure that agents are informed and armed withenough information to handle customer requests in a very timely manner.

Artificialintelligence technology in meeting rooms

In addition to AI being used in contact centres, this technology will also be leveraged for in person and virtual meetings as well. For instance, today's mics offer voice and background noise cancellation which is powered by AI. An example of this is the Noiseblock AI solution that Poly uses in both its meeting room devices and headsets. Similarly, collaboration platforms are becoming more intelligent and can identify background noise such as a dog barking and can mute that person on the call automatically. Through adaptive learning, collaboration platforms can adapt to different situations during a meeting and self-heal through a built-in algorithm within the platform.

With these key trends in mind, 2020 is expected to continuously evolve inthe way we work. From new collaboration tools and updates, mixed reality, theintroduction of new services and more, the return to the office will look differentlythan it did before, and that is not necessarily a bad thing. There is a worldof opportunity for the future of work, and we're excited to see what othertechnologies will lead the way.

For more information on the latest collaboration technologies and our capabilities, visit cdw.ca/collaboration or contact your CDW account team.