In the aftermath of the two waves of Covid and fear of a possible third wave, the way of doing business is expected to undergo a major shift including helping companies explore new avenues of revenue and maintain a check on business travel expenses.
AI backed video communication may play a larger role than travelling for business claims an international service provider.
In the aftermath of the two waves of Covid and fear of a possible third wave, the way of doing business is expected to undergo a major shift including helping companies explore new avenues of revenue and maintain a check on business travel expenses.
“There will be new solutions coming up for sure as people will use capabilities of video and channels around video and artificial intelligence (AI). There will be newer applications and possibly newer avenues explored in terms of customer service, on screen transcriptions, newer streams of revenue, etc,” says Ravi Saraogi, Co-Founder and President (APAC), Uniphore, a global leader in Conversational Service Automation (CSA).
Based on the response to a video communications survey with 3,100 consumers spread across the US, India, Australia, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, UAE and Vietnam to measure their sentiments toward video communications, Uniphore found that companies are discovering that audio and video backed by layers of AI is enabling them to further improve the services being provided by them as in the case of telemedicine and IT services.
Saraogi feels that a lot of business and services related travel within the country and overseas will not go back to pre-Covid era, particularly when local rules and regulations permit. For instance, companies may still be required to deploy staff in the US in cases where offshore services are not permitted
“But where rules and regulations permit and work can be executed over video channels, we may not need to send our personnel anymore or in numbers as before,” Saraogi states in an interaction with Outlook.
This could help improve margins of companies due to savings on travel costs and expense of relocation of staff. During the Covid lockdown period and travel restrictions afterwards many companies did depend on video call to continue operations. This was not possible in many cases where foreign clients were involved.
Going forward, despite easing of travel restrictions, company executives may not feel the need to travel for one-to-one meetings, which often necessitates a day or two of travel for meetings lasting half a day or a couple of hours. Instead, they may continue to opt for three or four video calls in a single day to complete the task.
“For services companies, particularly in the IT sector, this would obviously help to improve the performance and profitability,” Saraogi opines.