COVID-19: The Crisis Has Underlined the Need for Omnichannel Contact Centers

G. Barton

Summary Bullets:

• Omnichannel delivers an enhanced and consistent customer experience.
• Omnichannel should include social media, mobile apps, and video.

The COVID-19 crisis has set the contact center at the epicenter of the customer contact process. While the trend has been slowly moving away from interactions between businesses and clients at brick-and-mortar branches, the COVID crisis lockdown took away the in-person option for almost all circumstances in one move. The result is a widely varied mix of experiences, but for most organizations, it has been a disjointed one. This is understandable, as the first priority in the early stages of COVID-19 was just to make sure a minimum viable level of customer contact was achieved. But we are now moving gradually out of lockdown and GlobalData’s research makes clear that companies are now reassessing their IT strategies. For the contact center, this means that many organizations are looking to move away from legacy platforms. As they do so, the question becomes: What next?

COVID-19: IoT and Edge Computing Could Support Green Recovery for UK Economy

C. Drake

Summary Bullets:

• Edge computing and Internet of Things (IoT) innovation could play a major role in helping to drive a post COVID-19 recovery for the UK economy.
• Initiatives to harness the benefits of edge computing will need to be collaborative, as well as addressing important questions about architecture design, energy use and security.

Edge computing involves the use of computer processing, data storage and analytics capabilities close to the places where data is collected and where digital content and applications are consumed. Edge computing is increasingly seen as an essential enabling technology for a wide range of applications related to IoT, including environmental monitoring and traffic optimization sensors as well as IoT solutions that support energy and water management in social housing and public sector buildings. Local processing capabilities remove the need to send data to far-off data centres for processing, therefore accelerating the speed at which IoT sensor data can be processed and acted on. An associated benefit is the lower bandwidth and storage consumption costs that can be gained by not having to send large volumes of data to be processed elsewhere.