Organizational communications describes internal communications when messaging is more top-down in nature, while operational communications describe internal communications that are more midlevel in nature, constrained to a functional area of the business. Gartner also describes the market in terms of “communication journeys” that represent a collection of similar communications, content, media and analytics related to a business or employee experience goal. “Communication journeys describe how ECA technology addresses workforce segmentation, channels, campaign management and analytical insight for those journeys,” said the research firm. Typical features and capabilities of ECA solutions include the ability to handle communication needs such as company newsletters, alerts or executive views; the ability to integrate with common and external applications and deliver messaging across multiple channels; multimedia support; accessibility; and campaign management. More recently, leading vendors have added analytics and intelligence and have expanded into adjacent markets enabling their wares “to handle nontraditional needs of your typical corporate communications or HR teams,” said Gartner in its recent report on the ECA marketplace. “These emerging features address use cases that are more operational in nature. Capabilities of ECA vendors moving in this direction are starting to include native features (or integrations) to address the tasks, content or other activities directly tied to the communications content.” Leading vendors are positioning their products beyond the traditional scope of internal communications to address employee experience goals, said the research firm, while building out campaign and operational features to expand business opportunities. Vendors have realized “that ECA analytics have value to other initiatives such as voice of the employee (VoE) efforts,” Gartner continued. “An important area of differentiation for ECA products is to provide a work management environment to coordinate and automate the myriad back-end IC activities needed by communicators,” explained the Gartner report. ECA technology also must unify and orchestrate the delivery aspects of internal communications across all technology channels to enable a better employee experience. “In this way, ECA products act as a governance control point to enable consistency and flexibility for both communicators and employees,” Gartner researchers continued. “Communicators need to report back to stakeholders on workforce insights and business impacts arising from communications.” For ECA products to grow as a governance control point, Gartner researchers argued, “the breadth and depth of communications they handle must expand.” Gartner also found that the most common form of deployment is multitenant hosted by a third-party provider, while a full 84.2 percent of deployments being multitenant-hosted in some form or another. “This large proportion of cloud-hosted deployments reflects modern-day emerging market trends where vendors take full advantage of cloud infrastructure options,” said the research firm. Onpremises trends, they continued, are affected by digital signage options, which by nature are on-site. And not so surprisingly, since organizations tend to want to communicate to large segments of their workforces, deployments are often at a large scale, showed Gartner’s findings. Nearly seven of 10 paid deployments are across users bases of a 1,000 or more, while about a third of paid deployments are across less than 1,000 users. “This trend implies that decisions are more enterprise-wide by nature or targeted to all employees in a certain workforce segment, such as frontline workers,” said the report. “Other things being equal, new buyers should look for products and vendors with experience in deployment sizes that match their requirements.” ECA products, in general, are not geared to any particular vertical, according to surveys of 19 vendors. A spectrum of industry segments has varying levels of penetration, but sectors with the most “Above Average Presence” responses included banking, financial and securities; manufacturing; retail; and healthcare. Following is a listing of many of the leading vendors operating in the ECA space. Features Vendors Most Likely to Further Develop INTEGRATION Workspace by Facebook integration Microsoft 365 integration OPERATIONAL Robotic process communications Operational work coordination Chat-based workflow Message/Chat-based interface SUPPORT Campaign management Campaign analytics Source: Gartner 39 REMOTE WORK SOLUTIONS rwsmagazine.com
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