Over the past year, the focus on Unified Communications has shifted from an area of increased interest to a necessity for business continuity. While organizations quickly spooled up the technologies required for basic remote working, it has taken a little longer for many to work out exactly how to truly enable a remote workforce.

The need for action on this is pressing. According to the Life And Work Beyond 2020 study, commissioned by Avaya, 77% of the Indian employees have agreed to the Hybrid work model as they feel it will better their mental wellbeing. 56% of the Indian employees have expressed their support to work from anywhere considering the New Normal post-Covid-19.

Considering the scenario, it has become imperative to help organizations not only address the challenges of this new work-from-anywhere regime but come out of it better than ever.

The pandemic has compressed years of work-from-anywhere adoption culture into months, but trying to adopt a ‘business as the usual approach by just remote-enabling employees with a bunch of apps is not enough. For example, one of the biggest issues that organizations report is employees struggling with the fatigue of managing too many separate apps. They’re constantly switching between their video conferencing, their messaging, their email, their task management, and more. All while figuring out new ways to do business. Clearly, this isn’t sustainable, particularly when work-from-anywhere is here to stay.

This is where organizations are witnessing the rise of workstream collaboration, which replaces disparate communications tools with easy-to-navigate virtual workspaces and is built with today’s distributed work environment in mind. Hence, it is hard to ignore the importance of leveraging the powerful framework of CPaaS to enhance customers' and employees’ experiences. Organizations today need sophisticated workstream collaboration capabilities within a unified, integrated, all-in-one solution, with zero business disruption. And with CPaaS, it can help organizations to transform legacy communications into the new future of work.

CPaaS is at the core of the composable enterprise vision. Organizations today are looking at Total Experience strategies, which reimagine customer and employee journeys to the point that any experience across any touchpoint is effortless. These strategies are made up of lots of composable solutions, which address specific use cases and experiences.

So, one will look at Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS), which delivers best-of-breed building blocks in the area of employee experience and work automation. And then look at Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS), which enables the creation of an unforgettable multi experience for customers.

But CPaaS is the force multiplier that can truly enable a Total Experience strategy across the enterprise. It enables organizations to rapidly innovate to address a wide range of use cases. It provides a layer that accelerates the pace of innovation on top of monolithic on-premises or cloud communications infrastructure. It connects them with the latest API-driven cloud-based capabilities, that they can then use to compose new experiences.

Forget about the future – even today AI is being enabled in the cloud through CPaaS solutions. It can help to quickly spool up features like AI-powered background replacement and noise elimination and also creates virtual work environments, so it looks like workers are in an office or briefing center while eliminating distractions. And this is just the start. Going forward, AI will enable virtual cosmetics, fixing, for example, poor lighting or camera haze. Presentations will be enhanced with AI for more engaging meeting experiences.

Extending the offerings further, AI from the cloud also takes on more of the form of digital co-workers to get work done. Searchable AI transcriptions will differentiate voices, accurate real-time closed captions and translation, generate meeting minutes, identify and create tasks from within meetings or conversation streams. Richer voice commands will be available, while anticipatory search across multiple data sources will prioritize results based on activity. And if the AI is cloud-based, and not reliant on processing power in the device, it works on nearly anything - old or new.

That’s all enabled through a framework like our CPaaS platform.

The author is Kuntal Shah, Director- Sales Engineering India & SAARC, Avaya