Estimated at approximately 2.7 billion globally, frontline workers represent a considerable untapped market and growth opportunity for communications and collaboration solution providers.

For decades, the enterprise communications market has focused much of its collective attention on the carpeted office and knowledge worker segments. While communications solutions for this audience have evolved by leaps and bounds over the years, Frost & Sullivan recognizes that frontliners have been left behind and accordingly often use sub-optimal tools that fail to effectively address their needs and properly integrate them into the organization’s communications fabric. As a result, office and frontline workers within the same organization frequently operate in silos; limited communication and coordination often prevent speedy and effective decision making and otherwise adversely impact important workflows and overall business performance.

To enable an excellent end-to-end customer journey, it is imperative that businesses facilitate and actively enable effective communication links between siloed work groups, including office workers, contact center agents and frontliners. A highly collaborative workplace environment enables organizations to optimize business processes and better leverage diverse worker skillsets and expertise to increase product and services quality, improve safety, enhance customer service and support, and boost competitive power.

This study provides an analyst perspective on the opportunity to empower frontline workers with advanced communications and collaboration tools. It also includes data from a survey of global IT and telecom decision makers to quantify investment priorities and gain insights into tools used to enhance frontline worker productivity. The study also identifies growth opportunities for technology developers and service providers targeting organizations employing frontline workers.

Businesses must carefully assess frontliner technology needs and invest in advanced communications and collaboration tools that are specifically tailored for this workforce demographic. Right-fit technology investments deliver tangible business outcomes, including improved worker and customer satisfaction.

Over the years, cloud services have proved their value in enabling business agility and operational continuity—capabilities that became even more critical during the pandemic. Software-based communications and collaboration solutions that are accessible on demand from any device of the user’s choice are the preferred option for remote workers and contact center agents, as well as for many teachers, healthcare staff, and other frontline workers.

Increasing availability of mobile-ready communications and collaboration solutions creates opportunities to empower frontline workers. By providing business-class communications and collaboration capabilities on mobile devices modern cloud-based meetings, messaging and calling solutions greatly enhance remote and mobile worker productivity, align frontline and office workers, and optimize customer workflows.

Author: Elka Popova