The Evolution of Communication: Seven Game-Changing UCaaS Trends

UC meaning: unified communications refers to apps and services like call, chat, video, and audio conferencing provided from one cloud-based platform.

As the shift toward hybrid and remote work continues, the importance of unified communications as a service (UCaaS) platforms is growing exponentially.

UCaaS brings tools essential to remote and hybrid work—like chat, video calling, file sharing, and calendars—to a single, unified interface. This interface serves as the virtual desk, meeting room, conference hall, and water cooler of the remote workspace. In the digital world, it’s where collaboration, and all the progress, insight, and ideas that come with it, happens.

If your organization is looking to improve its remote work strategy, the importance of UCaaS cannot be overstated. This article covers seven emerging UCaaS trends that will help you empower your remote workers to accomplish more. We’ll go over new tools, advanced analytics, AI, the expansion of 5G networks, and other trends that will shape the remote work environment in the coming months and years.

If your organization is looking to gain a competitive advantage in the remote work economy, understanding these unified communications trends is a great place to start.

1. Tools for enhanced collaboration

In a physical office, human connection and collaboration happen almost effortlessly. For remote workers, it requires planning, coordination, and patience with technology delays and disruptions. That’s why new UC systems are designed to support more natural, uninterrupted collaboration in remote working environments.

With unified communications and collaboration, everything relies on speed. In in-person conversation, there’s no such thing as lags, disconnects, or crashes. Employees in the office talk in real time, without technology getting in their way. Modern UCaaS platforms are better optimized for speed and bandwidth than their predecessors. The latest version of Microsoft Teams, for instance, was built on new architecture to be twice as fast as the previous version. Faster architecture means higher voice and video quality, and more reliable video conferencing.

Video conferencing has become an essential component of remote collaboration. It allows for intimate, dynamic interactions at full speed, allowing remote employees to get closer to the experience of in-person meetings. Modern UCaaS platforms are capable of supporting these deeper personal connections at an enormous scale. You can host video meetings with thousands of employees almost as easily as a private 1-on-1 meetings. Built-in Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) services ensure people who aren’t on the UCaaS network can participate in meetings through cellphones and landlines.

The benefits of UC systems go far beyond improved voice and video experiences. Here are some real-life examples of the use popular collaboration features that are offered in UC systems:

1. Grupo Fleury, a healthcare system based in Brazil, uses file sharing to quickly share documents and schedule meetings without relying on email.

2. Boots Opticians digitized workflows, scheduling, and time-off requests, and made it easier for managers to remotely assign tasks and track progress.

2. Improved flexibility and scalability

UCaaS platforms empower employees to work where they want and on any device. Most UC systems have versions for iOS, Android, Windows, and Mac OS that allow employees to stay in the flow of their work, even when switching between work and personal devices. For example, employees can receive messages on their work laptops and respond to them on their personal smartphones without disruption.

You might think this flexibility comes at a high cost. However, consolidating communication services through UCaaS typically lowers overall costs. This is because embracing UCaaS platforms often allows you to eliminate other communication services, such as landlines.

The transition to UCaaS can happen quickly, too. In a single day, SAP, a German software company, migrated 15,000 employees’ landlines to a unified communications system. Within 10 months, 150,000 employees migrated to that system.

Unlike previous commercial telecommunications systems, UCaaS platforms are designed to make large-scale migrations as quick and painless as possible. It’s also easier to scale with UC, meaning that if your organization expands or wants to extend its services to a new team, you can usually do so quickly.

3. Increased use of advanced analytics and machine learning

Another rapidly developing UCaaS trend is the move toward improving employee experiences using advanced analytics and machine learning. Here are some of the ways they’ve been incorporated into UCaaS platforms:

1. Predictive analytics identify patterns in communication data to predict things like the best time to schedule a call or team meeting.

2. Machine learning-based noise suppression automatically blocks out unwanted background noise like appliances, dogs barking, and sirens.

3. Performance analytics offers insights into how employees are using their unified communications and collaboration tools, which can help you make better-informed business, training, and communication decisions.

4. More AI

You’ve most likely heard about the massive increase in the use of AI technology in the past year. UCaaS is no exception to this trend. UCaaS platforms are rapidly integrating AI to improve video and call quality, user experience, worker performance, and collaboration.

Here are a few of the main ways AI is improving UCaaS platforms:

1. Audio and video quality

With more video and audio calls being made than ever before, the quality of these services has never had a greater impact on the workplace. AI noise-suppression tools filter out background noise to ensure everyone is heard clearly. Machine learning also improves video quality through compression, upscaling, background blurring, and bandwidth adaptation.

2. Intelligent recap tools

More digital communication translates into more information and action items for your employees to remember. Intelligent recap tools automatically generate notes, recommended tasks, and personalized highlights from meetings. They can help your employees remember what they need to from a meeting, catch them up if they’re late, or provide a full recap (with transcription) for meetings they miss.

3. Virtual assistants

When most of your meetings and workplace interactions are online, it takes a different kind of coordination to make sure everyone is on the same page. It’s hard to know people’s availability and preferences. That’s why AI assistants are designed to help you do things like scheduling and managing meetings, creating agendas, and answering employee questions.

5. API-based integration

You’ve most likely heard about the massive increase in the use of AI technology in the past year. UCaaS is no exception to this trend. UCaaS platforms are rapidly integrating AI to improve video and call quality, user experience, worker performance, and collaboration.

Here are a few of the main ways AI is improving UCaaS platforms:

1. Seamless file sharing that allows you to send and receive files created on a variety of applications and open them without leaving the UCaaS interface.

2. Integrated reminder notifications about meetings, events, and deadlines that appear across your apps and devices.

3. Platform integration with other systems, such as your HR software, to make it easier for you to engage with employees.

6. Improved security and compliance

The adoption of remote work has introduced new security risks to your organization. Your remote workers are exchanging data across more devices than ever before. UCaaS providers have responded by making numerous security improvements to their platforms.

New security measures include enhanced data encryption, access control, and threat detection. Providers are also implementing specialized measures for specific industries to ensure their platforms meet their unique compliance requirements.

Of course, security is an ever-changing game, and the security needs of the future are difficult to predict. This is another good reason to consider using a UCaaS system, because the providers continuously adapt and improve their security to meet those threats.

7. The expansion of 5G

The effectiveness of remote workers sometimes comes down to one difficult-to-control variable: internet reliability. Whether your employees are working from different countries or the café down the street, an unreliable internet connection causes dips in their productivity. The expansion of 5G networks has the potential to eliminate many of these disruptions.

5G networks offer high-speed, low-latency internet access over wireless networks in the same way that cellphone service and data is delivered. Of course, reliable 5G is not available everywhere yet. But where 5G is and becomes available, remote employees will be able to connect to their work networks without relying on unpredictable local internet access.

The future of UCaaS is, in many ways, the future of remote work.

These seven UCaaS market trends—enhanced collaboration tools, increased flexibility and scalability, the integration of advanced analytics, AI tools, API-based app integration, improved security, and the expansion of 5G networks—will continue to shape the remote work environment of tomorrow.