With customer engagement at the heart of business success, companies large and small are increasing efforts to meet customers on their terms. That means offering as many communications channels as possible, with a consistent experience across them. For vendors, that means expanding feature sets to cater to the needs of a digital multi-generational society.
That’s part of the motivation behind the merger between CCaaS vendor Serenova and video collaboration provider Lifesize, which will add video capability to customer service teams from call center agents to field service techs.
“Our customers have been asking for a true omnichannnel experience natively in our stack,” said Serenova CEO John Lynch, who will become senior VP of sales within the combined organization. “They are looking for improved and different ways to collaborate and share and solve real-life problems.”
The new company will be led by Lifesize CEO Craig Malloy, who said, “Deeper customer and employee engagement through more vivid, direct communications is where the world’s most successful businesses will distinguish themselves from the competition.”
While the role of video in customer interactions is still a work in progress, there’s no question there are valuable use cases. For instance, field service workers could use video to draw on additional expertise from the home office, saving time and costs by not having to make multiple truckrolls, and increasing customer satisfaction by solving their problems the first time. Video technology could also be used by customers themselves to visualize issues for service teams, to help reduce time to resolution.
For Lifesize, which has partners and customers in more than 100 markets, this is an opportunity to capitalize on the cloud movement by bringing its customers with a CCaaS product. It’s mostly a new target audience for Serenova, which has a predominantly U.S. base. For existing Serenova customers, it will make video available as part of an integrated experience.
But the elephant in the room is the missing piece – the UC component.
I’ve been touting the need for integration between internal and customer-facing communications within businesses for a decade, so this makes all the sense in the world, especially now that many of the UCaaS companies are including integrated CCaaS in their portfolios. Businesses may finally be seeing the advantages of bringing all their communications tech onto a single, integrated platform and unifying the entire business. Well, it would make sense, if Lifesize had more than just the video collaboration piece.
Marlin Equity Partners, the investment firm that drove the merger (and was also behind the LiveOps split several years ago that created Serenova), claims the move will help it address a massive UCaaS market. Considering the company has not made a UC or voice acquisition, if you’re placing bets, look for a UCaaS vendor to become part of the Marlin-Serenova-Lifesize family in the near future. Marlin already holds a rather broad technology portfolio, so adding a VoIP or UCaaS vendor is hardly a stretch.
“When combined into an integrated platform, we will be uniquely positioned to help organizations deliver communications experiences that far surpass the status quo, from the contact center to the meeting room, and beyond,” Malloy added.
The latest trends in customer engagement and experience, UCaaS, and how Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning can benefit both customers and internal users will again be the crux of the education at Future of Work Expo 2021. Taking place at the brand new Miami Beach Convention Center, June 22-25, 2021 as part of the #TechSuperShow. Future of Work will again sit beside its collocated events – ITEXPO, SD-WAN Expo, MSP Expo, IoT Evolution, The Blockchain Event, and more – to deliver a compete learning and networking opportunity for business leaders who need to know what new technologies will drive their companies into the future.
Edited by
Erik Linask
