When COVID-19 forced employees to work from their home offices and kitchen tables, flexible and efficient communication became more crucial than ever. Financial markets professionals – dependent on real time information flow and accustomed to the physical proximity of a trading desk – faced the new challenge of remote communication.
Symphony’s core collaboration capabilities and its Cloud9 voice platform offer a robust suite of tools, purpose-built for the financial markets. With the move to remote communication channels, our market-specific capabilities became an enabler of this sudden shift.
The pandemic was an unexpected wrench in the carefully-laid disaster recovery plans of many financial markets firms. These plans called for spare office space with duplicate infrastructure, assuming that work forces could reassemble at alternate sites. Instead, the pandemic drove companies to hastily adopt a variety of new cloud-native communication tools to support distributed work forces in their homes. Very quickly, firms were deploying a growing array of new platforms like Zoom and Cloud9, but also managing the increased use of non-compliant platforms like WeChat, WhatsApp and others.
For example, Cloud9 helped hundreds of firms quickly set up thousands of work-from-home employees who were originally earmarked for disaster recovery sites. Enabling personnel to log in from anywhere and access all their voice connections, such as speed-dials, hoots, direct lines, TV audio and intercom made it possible to continue business with minimal interruption and increased flexibility.
Due to Cloud9’s API-first approach and high-quality audio, customers were also able to deploy speech-recognition technology to transcribe all those conversations, enabling the sharing of real-time intelligence despite geographic distance. Cloud9’s capabilities met the needs of our customers during a stretch when no one knew what to expect – and accelerated their digital transformation in the process.
As Financial Service professionals utilize more communication methods, we facilitate them through our platform. By enabling clients to leverage such a wide variety of avenues, we are creating an “omnichannel” experience.