As businesses begin to transform their communications from telephony to a unified communications and collaboration (UCC) strategy, they achieve the benefits of lower costs and increased productivity. Organizations require strong communications and collaboration for success. It encourages effective interactions between team members and enables remote employees to communicate as though they are in the same office. UCC is also the key to ensuring high-quality interactions with customers.
Financial Benefits of Unified Communications and Collaboration
Reducing costs is a common goal for business owners. UCC technology can bridge the gap among mobile employees, help automate routine tasks, and reduce administration needs.
- Administration, maintenance, and updates are consolidated when voice mail, routing, queuing, and reporting are combined into a single solution
- Automation of routine note-taking and filing processes saves time and human resources, translating into financial savings
- Movement of the call center into the cloud reduces initial capital expenses
Productivity and Efficiency Benefits of UCC Strategies
A solution that streamlines processes and integrates departments within your organization also translates into higher levels of productivity and efficiency:
- Multi-channel methods of contact meet the communication preferences of employees, vendors, and customers
- Integration of a customer relationship management (CRM) solution allows all authorized individuals to view customer and prospect records, edit as needed, and answer calls knowing ahead of time who is calling and what his or her history is
- Possible self-service routing options to simplify customer contact with the company if appropriate
The 3 Elements of an Effective UCC Strategy
When considering your communications and collaboration strategy, you need to carefully select systems that are right for the way you operate your business and how you want to communicate. The three elements to include in every effective unified communications and collaboration strategy are:
VoIP and Presence
A VoIP phone system with presence capabilities is the foundation of any unified communications plan. Your VoIP telephone can go anywhere in the world where there is internet access. You can contact co-workers or clients just as you would from within the office via phone chat or video conference. A status indicator shows whether people are available to take calls or not, saving time and endless games of phone tag.
Email and Conferencing Legacy Systems
Today, you would be hard pressed to find a business that didn’t rely on email to communicate. Email by itself isn’t overly efficient, however. Collaboration improves when you build email into your unified communications and connect it to your web or video conferencing solutions, your telephone system, and even your calendaring system. Attendees can receive meeting notifications and reminders. (No need to call John, the guy who always forgets he’s supposed to call in!) With document or screen sharing during video calls, everyone can easily view and discuss the project in real-time.
Communications-Enabled Business Processes
One common challenge that can be reduced through communications-enabled business processes (CEBP) is human latency. For example, you may have a business process that requires an employee to approve each step before moving on to the next. CEBP will make use of unified communications to send an automatic reminder about the task awaiting completion. If that individual is busy with something else, away on vacation, or doesn’t respond after an indicated time period, a manager or supervisor will be notified. CEBP technology creates an efficient, automated process that improves ROI.
Despite the known benefits of UCC plans, the complicated nature of developing unified communication strategies means only 45.04 percent of companies have a UCC strategy in place. But the high-productivity value of UCC has 21.55 percent of businesses evaluating the development and implementation of a UCC strategy. [1]
Fidelus Technologies, based out of New York City is a Professional and Managed Information Technology Services company focused on customer success and business efficiency . Our services provide seamless networking, data center, wireless, security and unified communications expertise for medium and enterprise sized businesses. We have a consultative life cycle approach that includes requirements gathering, assessments, solution design, planning, project management, engineering, adoption and evolution (training) services to fully support the IT needs of your organization.
If you’re looking for more information on how Fidelus can help with your organizations unified communications and collaboration strategy please contact us here. To access our in-depth analysis on how IT teams across the country are using IT services and products withing their organization click below.
[1] 2017 U.S. IT Services Report sponsored by Fidelus.
