Communication – it’s the lifeblood of our interpersonal relationships with friends, family, and loved ones, but we often overlook exactly how crucial it is to maintaining effective business relationships as well. In fact, recent studies have shown that 60% of companies lack a long-term strategy for their internal communications while 74% of employees feel that they are missing out on vital company information because of non-existent or ineffective internal communications.
Some estimates found that disengaged employees could cost organizations over $450 billion per year due to wage loss, customer dissatisfaction, worker inefficiency, profit loss, and much more. However, it is a proven fact that fostering collaboration and engagement within the workplace offers a great deal of benefits.
Unified communication (UC) through centralized management systems vastly improves employee productivity and streamlines daily interactions while making business processes and decision-making quick and easy. This is why more business leaders are turning to sophisticated UC solutions as they modernize for an increasingly hybrid workforce.
With this in mind, here are five ways you can boost your workplace productivity and efficiency with the right platform.
The face of our modern workforce has changed dramatically over the past decade, but even more so in the past two years with the adoption of more flexible working environments. As a result, organizations across the globe have seen a significant increase in demand for tools that facilitate increased mobility.
UC solutions support this trend using robust mobility features that connect teams and customers from anywhere in the world, ensuring a substantial reduction in downtime. Your staff is able to log in, access emails, respond to inquiries, and set up meetings all from one centralized system. These tools also often include powerful purpose-built apps for employees’ smartphones that enable direct lines of communication on the go.
How many times have you received an urgent voicemail or email too late to provide assistance? Probably quite a few times over a long career. Fortunately, this is one of the challenges that UC helps alleviate.
A UC platform takes many of these legacy approaches to communications and builds layers of redundancy to ensure your employees always have full access to respond to messages in real-time. For example, a process can be set up where a missed phone call from another team member or client is transcribed into an email or text message, creating multiple ways for the message to be seen quickly.
Similarly, if an in-depth question arises at any point during traditional messages sent between employees, they can call directly from the same platform to get instant clarification and eliminate potential bottlenecks.
It’s no surprise that companies operate better when employees are able to effectively work together to solve problems and innovate. In the past, nothing worked better than getting your brightest minds all in one room together to tackle an issue. But what if your brightest minds are now miles away from each other?
UC fosters collaboration that doesn’t require everyone to be in the same room – or even the same building. Teams remain connected at all times via one network that facilitates a plethora of communication styles from virtual video conferences to instant messaging.
Visual collaboration, in particular, provides a valuable way of connecting individuals by enabling you to share screens, present product demonstrations, and build face-to-face rapport.
With increased mobility, collaboration, uptime, and efficiency, the right platform can significantly reduce business costs. Wasting precious billable time on playing telephone tag or waiting for an important email becomes a thing of the distant past.
Furthermore, cloud-hosted UC platforms don’t require new infrastructure or an in-house IT staff to manage it. The network maintenance and software support come directly from the UC provider themselves, reducing the overhead cost associated with maintaining disparate legacy systems.
Many solutions also operate via a Software as a Service (SaaS) model which means you pay a smaller monthly fee, instead of a large amount all at once. This makes it a perfect solution for smaller businesses or organizations with restricted budgets.
Many of our legacy methods tend to lack the ability to support seamless, informed communication with customers and prospects. Today’s customers want to engage with businesses via the channels of their choice, whether that is by email, phone, video conferencing, instant messaging, or online chatbots. They expect frictionless engagement and instant response. By taking advantage of UC, organizations are able to provide personalized, accessible experiences for their customers across any of these channels.
When it comes to providing support, both you and your customers want things resolved the first time they contact you. This reduces the amount of downtime for your client while preventing your team from losing productivity over the same issue. UC platforms allow an employee to quickly reference needed resources or loop in a colleague on a call to solve a customer’s problem without having to pass the customer between departments in a virtual game of hot potato.
The most important step to boosting your workplace’s productivity and efficiency through unified communication solutions is to partner with a firm that you can trust. To find out more about UCaaS and what an authentic trusted advisor can do for your business needs, please contact Fidelus Technologies at 1.866.343.3587 or visit our website at www.fidelus.com.
