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Fuze wants to make the experience business users have when using enterprise communications technology as easy and intuitive as what they get from their consumer products.
The cloud-based unified communications (UC) vendor on Oct. 11 is unveiling a new user interface that combines voice, video and messaging into a single application to give customers an improved user experience. It offers an enterprise-grade platform that brings the quality, reliability, security and analytics that businesses need, according to company officials.
The UC-as-a-service (UCaaS) vendor developed the redesigned user experience by moving away from the traditional approach of designing business software by asking people what they want and then trying to create a product to address what they’re asking for, according to Fuze CEO Steve Kokinos.
“With our redesign, we took a consumer-inspired approach to [user experience], observing individual behavior in a personal setting and then optimizing the experience based on that user behavior,” Kokinos said in a statement. “On average, people use four to six communication apps at work daily. The result is a disconnected experience with an overlap in services that creates redundancy and confusion. For the business, this results in poor user adoption, a lack of control, and excess cost associated with multiple overlapping technologies.”
Employees won’t tend to continue using communications technologies that don’t give them a good user experience, and what they find in consumer products sets a high bar, Fuze officials said. They noted a Gartner study that found that not only do many employee-facing applications provide a poor user experience when compared with consumer applications, but companies many times can’t improve the user experience in these third-party apps.
In addition, a survey by Fuze of more than 1,000 workers in the United States found that 73 percent said workplace technologies need to catch up in quality to consumer offerings. In beta tests of the new user experience from Fuze’s new app, 80 percent of testers regularly used the app over the course of several months.
With Fuze’s new app, employees need to install and learn only one interface across voice, video and messaging both internally and outside the business, which reduces the need to learn multiple products, company officials said. That should help drive up UC adoption and improve productivity, they said.