4 UCaaS market trends driving vendor offerings
The features users are looking for in UCaaS platforms are ever-evolving. Vendors are focusing on adding and improving features based on market demand and trying to keep up with alternative UC offerings. This year’s Gartner UCaaS Magic Quadrant identified four key UCaaS market trends that are driving vendor offerings.
- Improved dashboards, portals and tools
UCaaS providers put a heavy emphasis on dashboards, portals and tools this year. The investment in these features is an attempt to catch up to application specialists that have mature offerings containing these features. The tools getting the most attention are focused on onboarding new customers, IT self-administration, and measuring service quality and performance.
- Team Collaboration
The majority of UCaaS providers include team collaboration offerings as part of their UCaaS portfolios. Shared conversational workspaces and content and file sharing are becoming ubiquitous across team collaboration offerings. More users are placing value on team collaboration as they look for applications that allow them to share, converse and track progress. Many of the offerings from UCaaS vendors are still evolving, and have not caught up to more mature platforms like Slack. But the UCaaS market trend toward team collaboration is pushing vendors to close the gap.
- Globalization
Over the past year, UCaaS providers have focused on building out their global capacity to address growing markets in non-English speaking countries. This UCaaS market trend focuses on expanding multilingual services and support staff in North America, Europe, Asia and Latin America. While English-speaking countries remain the strongest for services, the gap is beginning to shrink. While most providers feature documentation in multiple languages, 24/7 support for non-English languages has yet to become the norm.
- Video-focused user experience
Video isn’t exactly a new UCaaS market trend, but attitudes and approaches toward the user experience are changing. While vendors have focused on developing and enhancing video capabilities such as screen sharing and whiteboarding, now they’re focusing on improving the user experience through video-friendly design, such as embedded video. These UCaaS platform updates also include interfaces that allow users to hide menus not in use, making it easier to focus on participants and shared content.
On the Horizon
While Gartner identified four main UCaaS market trends, some trends are on the horizon. Virtual assistants, AI capabilities, IoT integration and conversational user interfaces have only recently garnered attention in the UCaaS market. A select few providers that have either already embraced these technologies, or have a road map that includes them in future offerings. According to Gartner, chatbots are an indicator that some of these features may become trends in the near future, as several providers have incorporated chatbots into their team collaboration and contact offerings.