The global economy requires new ways of doing business. It simply is not feasible to travel to all locations to meet prospects, customers, fellow executives, and colleagues. It’s inefficient, too expensive, and hampers productivity. Today’s companies are global operations, with distributed workforces, worldwide clients, and round-the-clock customer support. When the workday ends in one part of the world, it’s just beginning on another continent. Increasingly, knowledge workers are trading cubicles at corporate headquarters for remote offices, mobile workplaces, and virtual rooms. Travel budgets continue to shrink, while the need to work collaboratively with global teams continues to amplify.

These new global realities can be challenging, but they also bring tremendous opportunities. A visionary IT and business leader can harness the latest trends and technologies to increase productivity, maximize efficiency, reduce cycle time, extend business reach, and improve communication.

Web conferencing offers organizations the power to reach people, share information, collaborate, and stay connected with global, virtual teams—anytime, anywhere. The introduction of web conferencing has forever transformed the way organizations do business. Instead of costly and time-consuming travel, it’s now possible to reach colleagues, customers, and partners instantly over the web. Organizations can bring together people from across the hall, or across the globe, to attend training sessions, present at product reviews, or brainstorm new ideas. Organizations can provide their customers with round-the-clock support from highly qualified experts who are now only a click away. And perhaps most importantly, organizations can help ensure that company continues to operate even when weather, traffic, or natural or man-made disasters prevent them or their employees from getting safely to work.

Contact centers expand on calling functionality to include other ways a customer can contact an organization–or an organization can reach customers–like online chat, social media, and SMS texting. Using contact center software, organizations can further personalize interactions to go beyond simple inbound and outbound calls to help truly transform customer experiences.

Contact center’s goal is to improve the customer experience. Helping spearhead this initiative are digital innovation and changes in customer behavior. Technology has expanded to include new contact channels, and customers are eager to do business with companies that provide high customer engagement.

In an industry that used to rely on hardwired phones and email as recently as 10 years ago, modern contact center solutions now enable a truly omnichannel approach. The always-on nature of the omnichannel contact center includes avenues like SMS text, social media, online chat, and yes, those trusty phone calls.

There are multiple benefits of contact center technology. It’s positively affecting the customer experience and customer loyalty. Customers seek to interact with companies when, where, and how they want and not be limited by an organization’s office hours.

As the way customers and companies interact continues to evolve, the contact center industry is also adapting. Behavioral trends and technology that are shaping the future of contact center include:

• Real-time, on-demand service
• Self-service contact center
• Personalized attention and responses
• Chatbots
• Social media
• Mobile and SMS texting
• Video conferencing
• Analytics

Employees, customers, and suppliers have big expectations when it comes to calling and collaboration experiences. More enterprises are working and sharing globally, and the number of remote workers continues to increase. Employees and customers have come to expect flexibility in anytime, anywhere communication. At the same time, business success hinges on enabling quality collaboration.

Collaboration solutions bring people together anywhere — on any device — with a single architecture for clear delivery of voice, video, and data. Whether calling, creating, viewing, messaging, sharing, conferencing, or using voice or presence capabilities, organizations need to be able to do it from a variety of devices. From desk phone or laptop to room monitor or mobile device, the experience should be seamless.

There’s no doubt that calling and collaboration solutions need to evolve to meet the needs of today enterprises. Cloud collocation solutions provides the most flexible and agile options to serve calling and collaboration needs.