IP telephony is the foundation for the requirements that need to be met with unified communications in business. Unified communications, or UC as it is commonly called, attempts to provide instant communication between staff that goes beyond traditional devices such as phone and email.
In fact, it serves to unify additional types of communication media including wireless, video, instant messaging, and voice recording. What started out as a trend has now become big business as companies all over the globe are switching to unified communication services.
What Is Unified Communications?
Unified communications is all about bringing together modern forms of communication –apps, data, video, and audio. The goal of this technology is to provide easy access to data for employees who work in a single environment. It makes sense that to get the most out of your communication efforts, all media should be networked, connected, and integrated.
But you can’t BUY unified communications because it’s just a theory. Integrating different kinds of communication media to enhance business processes is not a new concept. But it is becoming more important as time moves forward. While you cannot buy unified communications, you can have a unified communications strategy.
A dedicated business telephone systems provider will be able to help you design, develop and build a unified communications system that will complement your business practices. Instead of choosing a simple telephone system, you will have the opportunity to streamline, converge, and network your communication pathways together.
Well planned UC will improve communications and collaboration between customers, staff, and owners. Ideally, these unified communications will keep people in touch all the time through a range of wireless devices or applications that have no central location. You can use or access them anywhere!
Unified communication tries to boost collaboration wherever a need for it exists. When people are more connected, they are easier to reach, and customer service is greatly improved. Things that usually impede business such as travel, technology break down, and human error are surpassed with a unified communication system.
Benefits of UC
There are dozens of benefits to implementing unified communications on your business premises. Above all, the chance to update your telephony to the point where all modern media can be used to improve your business is not something to ignore! Done correctly, UC could be the solution that you have been looking for.
UC boosts productivity and innovation: When all of your communication can be managed and accessed from a single location, it improves productivity and lends itself to future innovation due to the increase in speed of delivery.
- Elimination of traditional communication silos: When communication is difficult, disconnected, and hard to use, the business suffers. Having 10 different forms of communication with no unified process or system in place results in confusion, delay, and repetition.
- Collaboration: Easily one of the best benefits of UC is collaboration. When sharing data is done collaboratively across multiple devices, people are always informed. Ideas and data are swapped and shared instantly and processes speed up.
- Increased communication: When all available devices and systems are under one roof, communication improves. Changing a voice message into an email or a text message has never been easier. With increased communication comes more efficient day-to-day strategies.
- Ease of access: Clearly a prominent benefit is ease of access. When all staff can connect to each other, and the business, in multiple ways, things happen faster. Work is done quicker and progress is made on a more measurable level.
- Instant information: When you have access to everyone in your business’ current availability and presence, you are better able to respond to customer needs.
- More customers: When communication becomes easy, so does nurturing quality relationships with customers. Your business will grow because you have more time to build solid foundations with the customers you have, while simultaneously finding new customers.
These business benefits of unified communications are just the tip of the iceberg. In fact, there are many far reaching implications of integrating all of your communication systems together. Your bottom line, for example, will almost always benefit when a communication practice improves.
There is certain continuity in your business processes when you implement unified communications in your company. Things such as supply chain management and customer relationship management will also receive a healthy boost from the improvement in communication strategy.
Can It Really Increase Productivity?
Building business productivity can be one of the main challenges any small to medium sized business can face. The good news is that unified communications is a trend that has really caught on, and it is increasing productivity for businesses of all sizes across the globe.
When you streamline your communication processes, you are doing it for one singular reason—to improve the overall efficiency of information sharing. This means that all elements – people, location, devices, systems, and processes – are affected.
If all forms of communication are connected, they can be easily integrated with each other. Your business will be able to respond to its customers in an unparalleled variety of ways. A customer, for example, may call and leave you a voice message. In response you can choose to email, call, IM, text message, or video conference with them.
It really depends on your needs. Great options means more optimized processes. For example, if that customer was requesting a pricelist, in the past it would be an absolute debacle getting them the right information that would improve sales. With unified communication, a simple click and send is enough.
Productivity naturally increases as time is saved, resources are conserved, and costs are kept to a bare minimum. Business owners understand that if they can regularly achieve these three basic features of business, productivity will increase. This is because there will be more money, more time, and happier customers dealing with your company.
There is real power in convergent technology, especially when it improves customer-facing processes and internal functions of the business. In a recent study by Sonus Networks, they concluded that unified communication has a very important role to play in productivity.
What you can take away from this study is that the larger a company gets, the more time they spend on filtering incoming communications. A basic UC infrastructure can improve productivity lost on ineffective communication by as must as 23%, or up to 1.21 hours a day per employee.
If your small or medium sized business is looking for a way to rapidly improve your chances of annual growth and income, you need to consider getting yourself a unified communications infrastructure.
Implementation Concerns
There are some concerns that you need to be aware of when implementing unified communications infrastructure into your current business. We already know that UC gives your business the right kind of communication using the right devices. These are accessible to anyone that works in your company. As a result, certain challenges arise that need to be dealt with before implementation.
- Cultural challenges: When UC is first implemented in a company, there are those people who embrace it and those who reject it. It takes a significant cultural shift to get everyone using the technology correctly. This means keeping eager employees from overusing it and helping hesitant employees learn what it is about.
- Policy challenges: You will need to make it clear to your employees that in order for UC to work, they need to be open to other forms of customer communication. Most people are not yet excited about the idea that customers can call their cell phones, leave text messages, or video conference whenever they feel like it.
- Communication interruptions: Having this speedy form of communication will be rough, because it will escalate over time. This means that your employees need to be prepared to be interrupted many more times a day, and they need to learn how to recover from interruption in a much faster manner.
- Education challenges: In order for your staff to properly use unified communications, they need to understand which medium is the best to use at that predefined moment. The only way they can learn this is if you take the time to teach them.
- Baby boomer challengers: The baby boomer generation is always reluctant to try out new technologies or systems. They usually do not understand the concept or premise behind unified communications, so spend extra time making sure they do.
- Abuse challenges: Some employees will abuse your unified communications system. You can, however, put monitoring and control software in place to curb the abuse of technologies such as text messages, IMs, and video conferencing.
If you can deal with the human side of integrating these new systems, you will not have many concerns to deal with. There is always a teething phase whenever something new is implemented in business, so prepare for it. You will have to learn how these integrated systems work, alongside your employees.