Welcome to Ask the Experts, brought to you by CloudServicesUniversity.com. In this video, Intelisys’ Cloud Evangelist Brandon Knight discusses how new and different UCaaS collaboration tools can help your customers increase employee productivity and improve the customer experience with 8×8’s Jamaal Savwoir. Learn more about UCaaS solutions from the 8×8 team here: https://cloudservicesuniversity.com/supplier-directory/8×8/
| Brandon: | All right guys. It’s time for our Ask the Experts section. And, this time our expert joining us is Jamaal Savwoir from 8×8. Jamaal is a Sales Engineering Manager. So Jamaal, welcome to the studio. How are you doing? |
| Jamaal: | I’m doing great, Brandon. How you doing? |
| Brandon: | All right. So knock out my first question for me. How do you say your last name? |
| Jamaal: | Savwoir, Jamaal Savwoir. |
| Brandon: | Oh, all right. I wasn’t that far off. All right. We’re gonna cover now … I want you to talk a little bit about what you’re seeing in collaboration. What are some of the things that are new and different now? The whole UCaaS thing has moved well beyond just voice, right? |
| Jamaal: | That’s right. Yeah so in terms of that, UCaaS has certainly moved beyond just voice. There are lots of opportunities to connect with people in lots of different ways. You have your video; your meetings; web collaboration where you can share information, share desktops and things like that. We’re also seeing a lot of collaboration tools around just sharing information among teams. Whether that be communication between individuals or my team sharing information with your team. Any persistent chat environment where you can create rooms on the fly or have rooms that track a particular project; where you can keep things like documents or conversations that may start in one place but end up going a totally different direction. And having all that history available as your organization grows so new people coming in can see how issues were handled, how people interacted and also how customers are served within that organization. |
| Brandon: | Yeah. I think what’s interesting about that is–and you can touch on this a little bit specific to your guys’ product. But I think in the past, we’ve kind of seen collaboration done with maybe four or five, even six different pieces of software, right. Six different things running on a person’s laptop. Maybe something running in a conference room and something different on a manager’s desk versus an agent desk. And people going to one place for video, and one place to do teleconferencing, and one place to do document sharing. But I think we’re seeing true collaboration more now, where you’re getting a lot of that from one source, right? |
| Jamaal: | Certainly. And in some organizations, you have teams that are using different tools and some of those are what they may call ‘best of breed’ for that particular piece of the organization. But the real power is being able to share that information among those teams. So you can look at a solution that maybe builds bridges across those teams, connects those teams together and just allows that collaboration to continue even as people change, as people move throughout their organization. And giving them that one interface that allows them to connect those different things together. And also in the future state, be able to roll up analytics that kind of point to how often those teams communicate, what type of information they may be sharing, those sorts of things. |
| So definitely, you see some cases where you may have a HipChat and a Slack and that kind of team collaboration or persistent chat environment. Being able to tie those things together provides a lot of power for that organization. | |
| Brandon: | All right. My last question here, I’m going to ask you to do a little bit of a crystal ball effect, right? Because we’ve watched collaboration grow from just voice to now being voice, and document share, and video, and conferencing. What are you thinking, man? What’s on the horizon for us in the collaboration space? |
| Jamaal: | You know I think really is more unification. It’s being able to tie those things together and being able to escalate a conversation. If I’m in a persistent chat room with a few of my co-workers, we need to bring another person in. Maybe now we want to just immediately escalate that to a video conversation or web collaboration session where we can work in real time. It becomes a technology win when you can have that real-time experience but also have the conversation history. |
| So I see that as a big benefit. And also the concept of building that workgroup in a chat environment but also having that extend into the telepathy environment. Maybe you want to publish a number so you can reach the team that’s working on that specific project temporarily for that specific time. So I think seeing it escalate from the kind of information sharing, conversations, to being able to collaborate on documents and then ultimately into real-time communications where you can be even much more effective when you have to deal with customer issues or even internal issues within the company. | |
| Brandon: | Awesome man. Well, thanks a lot. Guys, there you have it. You heard from one of our resident experts. You can check out more information on iCSU about 8×8. Jamaal, thanks for your time, I appreciate it. |
| Jamaal: | Thank you. |
| Brandon: | All right guys, remember how to use this information. You have to challenge yourself if you want to challenge our customers. |
