12 Communication Trends Worth Your Attention in 2012

By now, some of you may have had the opportunity to peruse the “12 Communications Trends for 2012" predictions that Avaya came out with earlier this year. In our first go-'round, for calendar year 2010, our crystal ball captured 10 trends that predicted the rising prominence of contact-center analytics, process re-engineering and unified communications (UC). Our forecast for 2011 focused on shifts in cloud computing, virtualization and user support.

Of course, such forecasting isn't bulletproof. Many of the communication-enabled business processes that we cited in prior outlooks have yet to gain traction as workflow tools.

But some developments are unfolding as we had predicted, in some cases even faster than we had foreseen. We hit the mark on the growing use of social media, the industry acceptance of Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)-enabled technology, and the deployment of UC to serve increasingly mobile workforces and customer bases. These trends have steadily evolved from early-adopter challenges to mature opportunities to potentially leverage moving forward.

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?