Ringside: Insider Interview with Chris Berry

Welcome back to Ringside. Our interview series invites leaders from across communications and technology sectors to share their views on trends, current issues, and reflections on their careers. Today, we caught up with Chris Berry, the managing director of RingCentral Partner, Liquid Voice.

Can you tell us a bit about Liquid Voice?

Liquid Voice is a specialist solution provider of interaction recording and analytics software. We ingest any type of multimedia used in communications that you’ve recorded, need to record now or will need to record in the future. Liquid Voice consolidates these interactions in a single repository and links conversations. This makes it easy for organisations to search for recordings and analyse interactions, which generates invaluable insights.

What’s your role at Liquid Voice, and what do you love about your job?

I’m the managing director of our UK business; focusing on strategy and corporate governance. I’m also lucky enough to get involved in some of the more complicated customer requirements and be active in considerable partner relationship development. I love the tech industry’s ever-changing landscape and get a lot of pleasure out of solving problems in this sector. For me, this is the ideal situation. I genuinely love my job and am lucky to work with really great employees, customers and partners. I’m very grateful.

In what way has business communications changed over your career?

It’s now so easy for customers to consume business communications – this has been the most significant change. The evolution of IP telephony paved the way for easy-to-deploy systems provided by people (like us) who weren’t large-scale hardware manufacturers.

How have the events of the past 12 months impacted the way you work?

COVID-19 has accelerated the wide-scale adoption of cloud-based unified communications (UC). We started to work from home as soon as the government suggested it, which I realise is not possible for all industries. However, we have been fortunate to adapt exceptionally well and have seen an increase in productivity. There’s been an irreversible change (in a good way) in how businesses operate.

Although nothing beats being in a room with someone, and I am keen for this to return, factors such as congestion, pollution, transport costs, housing shortages, and work-life balance will mean that predominantly home-based working is here to stay.

How has the pandemic impacted cloud adoption, and what do you think will happen next?

As it stands today, I believe cloud communications platforms are at a stage in evolution where they’re delivering on their promise of quick-to-deploy, reliable and flexible solutions. Not that long ago, even the best-known cloud UC platforms had limitations that resulted in them being used infrequently, not being widely adopted, or businesses relied on several solutions to do the overall job.

Over the last few years, and in particular the previous twelve months, vendors have significantly strengthened and matured their solutions. The forced global exodus to home working has accelerated the evolution of this technology. What we are seeing is that people would prefer to use a rich, multimedia experience as the default now over a traditional telephone.

What’s eye-opening for me is how this changes things for larger enterprises. Previously, these types of businesses were heavily dependent on large and expensive-to-run offices for their workforce. Now they realise that the cloud offers them an alternative. It gives them the agility to expand both locally and across international markets. There is also a massive cost savings potential from not having to operate large centralised offices.

The final thing is flexibility. No-contract arrangements mean that businesses are no longer locked into long-term, often underperforming agreements with providers who are simply too big and difficult to stop working with.

Over the last few years, and in particular the previous twelve months, vendors have significantly strengthened and matured their solutions. The forced global exodus to home working has accelerated the evolution of this technology. Click To Tweet

Thanks a lot for your time Chris. We enjoy hearing from our partners as they always have valuable insights to share from their experiences, which is especially important during the challenging times many companies are going through now. If you’d like to find out more about Chris and Liquid Voice find him on LinkedIn.