The shift in the way the world does business has led to huge demand for delivery and drive-up services, providing last-mile solutions for consumers staying close to home. Businesses providing these services have had to scale up fast to meet demand, as Darach Beirne, vice president of customer success at Flowroute, (now part of Intrado) explained:
“We are seeing current and prospective customers seeking more network capacity that will allow them to scale services up or down to meet their needs on demand. As a software-centric carrier, Flowroute offers unlimited capacity, which enables this sort of scalability and provides users with flexibility and control over their telecom resources.”
Move fast and stay elastic
Agility is key, and provides leverage for more nimble providers to react fast to a changing world, and compete with bigger players for customer loyalty — provided their communications solution provider is sufficiently responsive to move with them, as Beirne continued.
“An elastic service is one that is flexible to an individual business’ or customer’s needs. Flowroute does not have minimum usage requirements for our customers. Therefore, customers can scale rapidly without investing in additional hardware.”
“An elastic service is also tailored to the business and can meet its IT and telecom needs as they evolve through market changes, internal shifts and technological advances…”
“Further, elastic services are not bound by location. With businesses relying on remote workers, the need for a reliable and expansive network is critical to business success.”
Ongoing stretchiness will surely be required as the world returns to work and commercial activity in an unpredictable future, and lessons are learned from the events of this period.
Businesses which were already cloud-based for their communications needs enjoyed significant advantage and greater resilience, and will be better-placed to cope with future legal requirements — such as Kari’s Law in the US, which mandates direct dialling of 9-1-1 with no prefix or preselection of a line required.
Communications technology has the capacity to save lives regardless of global health situations, as Beirne described, “Flowroute recently updated its processes to comply with Kari’s Law and provide improved safety to our employees and customers. Under this enhancement, all 911 calls placed on Flowroute’s network will capture the exact address the caller’s phone number is associated with in our system and route the call to the appropriate public safety answering point (PSAP)”. (Kari’s law was named for a 9-year old who tried to summon help while her mother was being murdered in a hotel room, but did not know you had to dial an extra number to obtain an outside line.)
The future is online
And as it’s clear that many previously face-to-face customer relationships will not be returning to the old normal for a very long time if ever, it’s clear that IP telephony (and unified communications in general) will become increasingly essential for all B2C business conversations in future — where customers will expect the clarity and responsiveness of the apps and tools they use in their social communications.
Beirne concluded, “We’ll see sales teams leverage virtual platforms and move away from on-premises visits — a transition that will require agile calling and messaging solutions. I also think we’ll continue to see customer support teams leverage virtual platforms to deliver customer service.”
