AT&T has augmented existing team collaboration features found in AT&T Office@Hand (Office@Hand) with contact centre capabilities that enable employees inside and outside a contact centre to influence the customer experience.
They include Office@Hand Contact Center targeted at contact centre agents and Office@Hand RingSense aimed at sales and support teams. With the additions, AT&T aligns itself with an emerging trend of coupling team collaboration and contact centre features in a single offer.
Although the additions decidedly enhance Office@Hand, they arrive late in the game compared to rivals, and the revitalised offer remains AT&T’s single piece in the team collaboration and contact centre spaces.
AT&T drastically streamlined its team collaboration and contact centre portfolio
Exactly three years ago in 2022, AT&T drastically streamlined its team collaboration and contact centre portfolio by terminating the resale of licenses for partner platforms including Zoom, Cisco, Five9, Avaya, and Nice. The sole exception was a limited, hosted, and white-label version of Office@Hand, RingCentral’s EX communication and team collaboration platform.
While AT&T narrowed its portfolio in part because of the thin margins associated with resale of licenses, in doing so, it severely curtailed revenue from two areas that continue to grow significantly and diluted its appeal to enterprise customers. AT&T also placed itself at a disadvantage to other service providers such as Verizon, Lumen, and Spectrum, which to this day provide services from a more expansive variety of vendors including from the likes of Cisco, Microsoft, and Zoom.
Tough competition
In entering the contact centre space via the new capabilities, AT&T also has the misfortune of placing itself in competition with those and other vendors, each of which have well-established contact centre estates.
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By GlobalDataIn addition, those vendors have benefitted from a balance of power that has shifted in their favour, with team collaboration platforms moving from service provider hosted solutions such as the former Cisco Hosted Collaboration Solution (HCS) and former Microsoft Skype for Business to contemporary vendor hosted platforms such as Cisco Webex and Microsoft Teams.
The timing is right for AT&T as contact centres change
Despite the rough patches associated with the announcement, AT&T is equipping itself with contact centre capabilities at a most opportune time. They align with a vibrant transformation, which contact centres have been undergoing with the concept of a ‘contact centre’ yielding to the broader concept of ‘customer experience.’
Contact centres are converting from having human agents to including AI agents, from reactive to proactive, from transaction-oriented to relationship-oriented, and from generic to deeply personalised. AT&T’s new capabilities will help organisations make the transition.
Like the contact centre space, AT&T is undergoing a profound transformation. The AT&T Business unit is centreing its identity around providing converged connectivity through 5G and fibre. Across AT&T corporate, a culture is being instilled that places a premium on personal contribution to the organisation as well as alignment with corporate values and utilises data to measure conformance to both attributes. It will be interesting to see what role the refabricated AT&T Office@Hand plays in this altered environment.
