Exploring the key themes at Commsverse 2024

In June 2024, Commsverse held their annual event at Mercedes-Benz world on the outskirts of London. Spanning two days, the event’s key themes included discussions on artificial intelligence (AI), user experience (UX), management of telephony, and capitalising on convergence.

As expected, AI was a hot topic at Commsverse, but more specifically looking at how businesses can maximise their investments in the various Copilots across the Microsoft suite. Key highlights included focusing on existing processes and workflows and looking to optimise them, exploring transferable use cases from industry peers and adopting them internally, small scale trials and tests in specific areas before wider implementations, and looking at new AI enhanced procedures and solutions when legacy platforms and systems reach their natural end of life.

There was also the consensus that partners are always looking for the “silver bullet” when searching for AI use cases. However, it was stressed that by putting Copilot into the hands of the user themselves, they can begin to figure out what the use cases are for their specific needs. Panels from Microsoft MVPs as well as stakeholders from a range of businesses with implementation experience gave their top tips and best pieces of practical advice.

UX was also a popular topic frequently discussed in the panel sessions, which addressed the challenge of how businesses can ensure a maximum uptake and usage across the full Teams app in terms of features and functions. Multiple speakers and sponsors were eager to show their focus on adopting the best practices to ensure users get the most out of their Teams platform, while simultaneously generating a healthy ROI. Often complex software platforms see low levels of feature utilisation, so addressing this within Microsoft Teams is a key focus for many businesses.

There was a lot of emphasis on Teams’ integrated communication options, particularly around telephony management and deployment and how both can be optimised to reduce tasks for administrators and management. Leading the session, speakers from various organisations provided insight into managing and simplifying Teams numbers and Teams phone deployments. There are now a range of companies which offer assistance services both via software or professional and managed services so end user organisations can streamline and maximise the efficiency of Teams telephony across Direct Routing, Operator Connect, or Calling Plans. Cavell also shared its latest forecasts relating to Teams telephony which show that there will be a sizeable market potentially of around 50 million users by 2028.

The final key trend related to convergence and how organisations can capitalise on this. As more organisations begin to use Microsoft for more of their technology stack (i.e., Teams for comms, 365 for productivity, integrated CC solutions for CX), it raises questions about how they can ensure the swift integration of these systems as efficiently as possible? Speakers addressed this challenge by discussing how organisations are now distorting boundaries which once linked UC and CC technologies to greatly improve both employee and customer experiences. A selection of system integrators now operate specifically in this area and a growing number of software providers have created solutions which cover wider ranges of the Microsoft portoflio with single management panes, allowing their customers to reduce data duplication and administrative tasks.

These were just some of the key topics and trends discussed at Commsverse this year. The event provides one of the best levels of community engagement witnessed anywhere in the communications industry attracting a range of Microsoft experts covering every subject matter area. This community engagement combined with growing presence from vendors and partners focusing on the Microsoft space ensures that Commsverse remains one of the key events for anyone interested in the Microsoft communications eco-system.