Top 3 Service Trends to Watch in 2016: Clouds, Flexible Delivery, and Self-Healing

Happy New Year!  Welcome to 2016.  Let’s see what trends will most likely impact this year.  Much has happened since we last offered prognostications for the year 2015.

As always, we turn to our panel of experts, the Avaya (News - Alert) Three, who included:

• Mike Runda, senior vice president and president, Avaya Client Services. Mike oversees revenue, regional execution and global offers for Avaya’s holistic suite of support and managed services.
• Richard English, managing director - Avaya Professional Services. Richard leads the company’s North American consulting teams, which deliver full lifecycle consulting engagements for global enterprise clients.
• Dan Pratt, senior director operations, Avaya Client Services.  Guest blogger of “The High Accountability Support Model Emerges,”  which provided insights on moving from hand-off to swarming in contact center support.

Here are the three predictions that we believe will be attracting the attention of our clients.   

80 percent or more of enterprises will use Public cloud, but Hybrid/Private cloud will remain the critical application workhorse for next 5 years.  

Going to Cloud has many benefits, but it can also lead to some new challenges that businesses need to consider. As solutions move from homogenous, monolithic technology to heterogeneous technology running on layers upon layers of cloud infrastructure, customers get increasingly concerned about Cloud security and accountability for service delivery/support of the full solution.  Customers will demand accountability and value from their “point” vendors, requiring strong relationships and mastery of the infrastructure implications which includes the Cloud applications, as well as the network and desktop/mobile devices which served them.   

The majority of businesses want to leverage a flexible delivery model to achieve growth in modular steps that help IT maximize ROI and support rapid business scaling

As systems grow in complexity both in features and size, IT managers are looking for a flexible service delivery model that can quickly grow when and where it’s needed in modular steps.  They are looking for a balance which honors business continuity, control, expense/capital management and integration. This need leads to the use of models such as consulting services, staff augmentation, project-based services, managed services and Cloud services options.  Several of these models can provide the flexibility and benefits of a cloud deployment in a traditional customer premise model.  Using these services can enable the IT organization to maximize their impact on the business while minimizing technical ramp time  

Greater Than 50 percent of Support Coming via Unassisted Support and Self-Healing Systems Means Differentiation Is Now About Relationships   

 As leading-edge vendors are putting more remediation and proactivity into tools and systems, the value-add of contracted support becomes less-visible to the customer.  Vendors will have to develop strategies and underlying system intelligence to improve customer experience with offers that help increase adoption and full value realization.  As well, vendors will need to fight against the depersonalization increased technical solutions can drive by working intentionally to maintain the human factors of the service event by implementing things such as relationship-based routing and service deliverables combined with high-satisfaction channels, most notably, video.