How Video Collaboration Solutions Can Help Businesses Deliver Value in the New Normal

As businesses continue to grapple with the ramifications of COVID-19 – including social distancing mandates and work-from-home life – video collaboration solutions have emerged as the go-to technology to help address these challenges.

For channel partners offering cloud communications to their customers, video conferencing tools are no longer a nice-to-have – they’re an essential core offering that can help partners deliver immediate, tangible benefits to their customers navigating “the new normal.”

Video Collaboration as the New Norm

According to a recent article by renowned industry analyst Irwin Lazar in No Jitter, video has “emerged as a core technology to support remote work.” His firm recently published a global research study, “Visual Communications and Collaboration: 2020-21,” which surveyed more than 500 companies. The study overwhelmingly demonstrated that the workplace has little appetite to revert to full on-premise implementations. According to the report:

• Only 8.2% of workers plan to return to the office
• 41.8% of companies are willing to maintain remote workers as they move back to their offices either full or part-time
• Close to 36% of responding organizations will continue to support full-time work-from-home environments – especially for co-workers who aren’t yet ready to return to their physical offices

All of these interactions among locations require efficient, feature-rich video solutions. “After all the years of hype,” Lazar concludes, “the age of video conferencing has finally arrived.”

Achieving Employee Productivity With Video Collaboration

Beyond accommodating the restrictions of social distancing and work-from-home infrastructures, video can deliver a meaningful return on investment for organizations and for the channel partners who support them. Case in point: as businesses set their employees up for seamless video conferencing, they’ll need to ensure that their home offices have sufficient bandwidth to support an increase in video traffic. This alone opens up new opportunities for channel partners to upgrade and manage remote workstations.

Video can also be leveraged to create a collaborative community using video conferences for team-building purposes. Lazar calls this the development of a “video-first culture.” Leadership can offer benefits such as virtual wellness instruction, personal finance classes, social hours, or trivia contests. These interactions allow coworkers to bond, which is seen as vital to successful online collaboration. Plus, it helps deter some of the isolation associated with work-from-home scenarios and reestablishes some of the “perks” of on-site workplaces. For channel partners, being able to supply video solutions that can be used seamlessly and effectively in both professional and more laid-back contexts can translate to deeper loyalty and trust from their customers over time.

Becoming the Trusted Advisor for Video Collaboration

However essential video collaboration tools may be, technology is only half the equation. Forbes magazine reminds business owners to develop policies to help employees understand the guidelines and etiquette of company-based video conferencing to improve results. Businesses should conduct training on how to use these platforms securely and avoid some of the missteps that occurred in the first weeks of the pandemic.

Here is where a well-versed channel partner can become truly essential. Simply providing the tools isn’t enough. Partners should be ready and willing to embrace their role as the trusted advisor – helping customers develop sound policies, understand the potential risks and pitfalls associated with video collaboration, and truly integrate video into their company culture. By training customers in how to best take advantage of video technology, channel partners can help businesses more readily adopt these solutions long term and achieve more effective and fluid collaboration.

CoreDial’s eZuce Acquisition: Providing Partners the Video Collaboration Tools They Need

As the marketplace embraces video, it becomes all the more crucial for channel partners to offer enterprise-class video collaboration. This is why CoreDial has taken the step to acquire eZuce, an innovative video collaboration and communication technology company, whose Vibe video collaboration platform addresses a range of needs for channel partners and their customers.

Our partners are delivering valuable and relevant solutions to an increasingly sophisticated yet complex customer base. Our expanded offerings will enable our channel to provide feature-rich, easy-to-deploy video services to customers while still enjoying the expanded margins and comprehensive support on which CoreDial has built its reputation.

Check out the press release on our eZuce acquisition for more information.