THE STRATEGIC IMPERATIVE
North American businesses and public-sector organizations are facing heightened challenges as COVID-19 quarantines and other lifestyle changes affect the way workers perform their job tasks and interact with co-workers, customers and partners. The unprecedented rise in remote work, supply-chain disruption, customer demand volatility and elevated employee and customer safety concerns brought to light the need to update business continuity programs and accelerate business process automation.
Digital technologies, including cloud communications solutions, have captured the spotlight in this time of crisis. To help customers more quickly enable businesses continuity by deploying flexible cloud services, many hosted Internet Protocol (IP) telephony and unified communications as a service (UCaaS) providers launched free trials and extended payment terms during the quarantines in the Spring of 2020. Cloud-based video meetings, team collaboration, phone system and UCaaS have provided much-needed tools for remote knowledge and task workers, as well as certain frontliners, such as doctors, nurses and teachers, to stay connected with both their internal teams and external parties, including customers, patients, students, suppliers and distributors.
