Chris Thompson (pictured) is vice president of enterprise product marketing at Plantronics.

Unified communications technologies are profound and powerful tools that help employees work on their own terms, opening the door to team structures and business models that were previously impossible. Yet despite the demonstrable benefits, widespread adoption remains an uphill battle.

Now that we’re past the early-adoption phase in the UC space, customers are more risk-averse. That requires many channel partners – particularly hardware resellers – to adopt a new business model. In the past, a reseller may have finalized a sale with little to add after the fact. But now, they must consider new factors such as compatibility, upgrades, support, periodic billing and services that influence the ongoing satisfaction of end users — some of which can lead to recurring revenue.

Essentially, channel partners need to think beyond traditional offerings and focus on the user experience (UX) to prepare customers for the constantly evolving nature of the modern enterprise.

Research shows this shift is sorely needed. Despite the proliferation of UC tools – many promising the utopia of mobile productivity – only 38 percent of executives and 40 percent of employees recently agreed that they have the tools they need to do their jobs at home or on the road, according to a study of 1,200 global executives and employees by Oxford Economics and Plantronics.

With a vast array of UC solutions, the barrier to greater UC adoption is not a lack of options, but an emphasis on ensuring that customers get the most from their UC ecosystems. Simply put, as users move from device to device and network to network, the experience varies greatly and often leaves much to be desired for users who value it most. To better understand the many factors that could impact the user experience, resellers should consider the fundamentals behind UX design. These principles are used to design everything from smartphones to websites and software, but can be just as valuable in the context of unified communications.

Here are the three principles of UX design:

Context Awareness: People expect their technology to be a seamless part of their lives. This means considering valuable information such as the user’s location, preferences, activities and availability that goes unused by many UC tools. Users expect smarter devices that automatically “know” what needs to be done, and behave how and when they want them to. Just like we now expect our smartphone apps to know what we mean when we search for “lunch near me,” we have the same expectations in a professional UC setting. This may mean an endpoint device that intuitively switches between multiple input streams, or a headset placed on your ears that automatically answers calls.  People want to think about the tasks their tools help them perform and not worry about the technology behind it.