Beyond the Hype: The Enduring Power of the Phone Call in UCaaS

Every company is not just made up of knowledge workers. Not every company even has knowledge workers. Therefore, when communicating in business, everyone does not simply use chat, get on video calls, send SMS, mine data for leads or find information browsing the internet.

Some businesses actually rely on the telephone! Think about storefront businesses, for example, or schools, or government agencies. Sure, they have websites that have enabled self-help and alleviated the need for as many phone calls as they took 20 years ago. But they still take a lot of phone calls, and they still rely on phone calls for business success.

As such, there are still many deployed UCaaS systems that support that type of business. It is all about making phone calls. Sure, maybe the UCaaS system now needs to have mobile and desktop clients, and probably needs to tie into Microsoft Teams if there is an enterprise with a headquarters office that uses Microsoft Teams, but the UCaaS systems for these businesses is all about telephone calls.

The next step for UCaaS, as you may have been reading about for a few years now is Artificial Intelligence, and bringing that to the UCaaS system. And just how I wrote that not all UCaaS users need the chat / video call kind of UCaaS system, not every UCaaS deployment will need AI. Yes, yes, I know you have been reading about AI all over the place, and AI will certainly have a place with any solution, including a UCaaS solution, but it doesn’t mean every UCaaS deployment will need it.

AI does bring benefits to UCaaS. For instance, we’ve all read (and maybe by now even used) the biggest use case which is note-taking on video calls, and automatically making a re-cap of the call and even dishing out action items. That is great. And I can see AI helping to see if there is fraud going on by looking at phone numbers being called, and looking at times of phone calls.

But that is not for every use case. Some enterprises don’t even want the system to “listen” to your calls. There are potential issues, such as privacy and intellectual property issues with that, to name two.

And is the extra price for AI even worth it?

For some enterprises, knowledge-worker type enterprises, the answer may surely be yes it is worth the extra price, and it’s OK to have the UCaaS system “listen” in.

But for many others, who are storefront type businesses, or government agencies, or schools, the answer more likely than not is, we just want phone calls. These enterprises can be “laggards” in adopting AI, figuring out what AI works for them. There is nothing wrong with that. The press and media are hype machines, looking for the next big thing. It is not that interesting for them to write about something seemingly so boring.

But it is business. It is your business. And you need to deploy what is right for you, not what someone else says is right for you.