54 CHANNELV ISION | JANUARY - FEBRUARY 2023 The industry has been throwing around CX and EX for a year. Companies have finally come around to the management thinking that Tom Peters has been espousing since the 1980s: Put People First. Happy employees make happy customers. EX promotes CX. One element of employee experience is their internet. In this workfrom-anywhere environment that was empowered by the pandemic but powered by ubiquitous Wi-Fi, the internet is vital. No one can work from anywhere without a quality internet connection. Video meetings, digital voice, chat, messaging, file share and many other functions delivered by robust cloud communications providers such as NEC, Intermedia and others need a solid connection. As we learned during the pandemic, 30 to 40 percent of the United States suffers from sub-par internet. The federal government is trying to change that with $40-plus billion in tax dollars to put fiber into the ground. In the meantime, what’s an employee to do with jitter, latency and packet loss? These issues have pushed SD-WAN to the forefront. SD-WAN allows for circuit bonding, failover, analytics and more. At the least, home offices can leverage the concept of SD-branch, which allows for bonding of two Internet circuits (such as DSL and cable or 4G). It offers an avenue of redundancy to increase the usable bandwidth at a small office or home. There are many providers in this space, since SD-WAN has become something of an over-used acronym. There are a number of hardware manufacturers that offer some functions of SD-WAN. At the same time, there are several vendors delivering on the promise of network-as-a-managed-service, which is almost like getting a mixture of VPN and MPLS. In the midst of these vendors are the orchestration layer vendors including VeloCloud, Versa, Viptela (Cisco) and HPE/Silver Peak. While all of these vendors fall in the SD-WAN bucket, there is a lot of variety in function, cost and service delivery. For service providers, this is a chance to resell broadband (4G/5G or other flavors) alongside their own circuits – or let the telcos provide the circuits – and increase ARPU (average revenue per customer) while improving the user experience. Lousy broadband interferes in collaboration. No one is enjoying a meeting with freezing video feeds or bad audio. When workers are remote, lousy broadband results in poor performance and a diminished employee experience. That is one of the many reasons employers want workers in the office. Logitech, Jabber and other vendors have enhanced hardware with AI in order to make video meetings better, but spotty Internet access trumps the fancy gear and artificial intelligence. Some companies have given stipends to workers to buy furniture and gear to make the home office more comfortable and productive. Again, a happy employee goes a long way to making a happy customer. The concept around workforce optimization (WFO) is to maximize employee productivity and customer satisfaction. The goal is to streamline every process for maximum results. The data is the key. WFO helps a business analyze communication with customers, recognize the root causes of customer behavior and contrive strategies to retain customers. WFO software can provide businesses with insights into customers’ habits, which can assist the organization in servicing their needs. This enables a company to respond to customer complaints faster, thus improving customer satisfaction. All of this data, the platform, the AI and even the agent require a quality internet connection. It all basically comes down to the broadband connection. As more and more moves to the cloud, as data (and the analysis of the data, especially in real time) grows, the internet becomes just as important as electricity. There is where the next-gen of SD-WAN in its various forms (SD-internet, SD-access and SD-branch) will truly be advantageous. And a huge opportunity for the channel! Peter Drucker famously said, “The purpose of a business is to create and keep a customer.” Retaining a customer makes the customer more valuable. You retain a customer with employees and service. The employee experience directly effects the customer experience. o Peter Radizeski is president of RAD-INFO INC., a telecom strategy and marketing consulting agency. He is a sales trainer, writer, consultant and speaker. He is available to speak at your events on channel, marketing, strategy or sales. By Peter Radizeski Let’s Make Customers Happy CORE COMMUNICATIONS The emerging SD opportunities for partners and providers
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