Unified Communications
Inspire, innovate and collaborate a digital workforce with unified communications.
Give Your Business The Competitive Advantage To Do More With Less.
The world of work has changed forever. Partly driven by technology making the change possible, and partly driven by the need to support remote teams and colleagues, the days of travelling to one place of work en-masse each day to do your job seems long gone.
UCaaS (Unified Communications As A Service)?
Taking the concept of UC one-step further and placing it in the cloud where it can easily be delivered in a convenient subscription-based model is the basic premise of UCaaS (or Unified Communications as a Service to give it its full title). Through this delivery method users can scale up and down as their requirements demand, avoid expensive initial charges for hardware and access the tools from any internet connected device.
UCaaS has had an impact on many business processes as it improves productivity and helps staff remain connected to their customers and colleagues.
What is Unified Communications?
In short, Unified Communications (often shortened to UC) brings all of the tools we now use throughout our daily working life together into one application. Through a single user interface users can easily select the channel they need, progressing a “call” from a simple webchat conversation through to a voice call, bringing in colleagues as necessary and eventually ending up with a full-blown video conference call with desktop sharing and collaboration. There’s no need to interrupt the flow by sending links for people to move to a new platform to access the channel that has become necessary.
UCaaS Call, Chat, Meet, Share
To support work across multiple locations and environments, businesses have adopted new technological tools to maximise productivity and ensure teams can continue to communicate and collaborate. Instant Chat, Video Conferencing and Desktop Sharing have now joined Email and Telephony as essential communications tools. But whilst many businesses have cobbled together a disparate collection of tools from the likes of Zoom, Teams, Slack and a plethora of others to facilitate working from home these tools are often not connected or integrated with each other. This makes it difficult for users to manage their interactions and conversations easily, needing to switch between applications as the conversation evolves.
It’s time for a Unified approach…
Business Continuity.
As we have seen over recent months, disasters happen and businesses need to find different ways to continue serving their customers, which is where UCaaS comes to the fore. By providing a suite of tools, UCaaS enables users to continue business as usual when their normal resources are no longer available or their usual site becomes inaccessible. UCaaS places all of the communications channels at the users disposal so providing they can get an internet connection, be that at home or another office location, they will continue to be able to operate as before.
Team Collaboration.
Grabbing a coffee and a meeting room may no longer be an option. Aside from Business Continuity issues, businesses now have the tools to look beyond their usual local community to hire the right team members, offering the ability for almost permanent remote working. This means that for teams to share ideas, solve problems and remain productive the “meeting room” needs to be more individual. UCaaS therefore facilitates conversations and gives them the space to evolve so when a “quick question” on webchat needs to become a desktop share conference call with several colleagues, it’s all there in the same application.
Customer Experience.
When a company aligns its internal communications process across the contact centre and the rest of the organisation with a flexible, cloud-based communications platform, agents can address customer queries faster and more precisely. The result is that customers end an interaction satisfied, which in turn leads to greater loyalty. And in addition to the considerable gains that a unified communications platform can generate for CX, it also helps companies improve employee engagement and interdepartmental collaboration.
Your business is individual which is why ICA tailor solutions to their customers specific needs but should you want to look at how Hosted VoIP could benefit your business then please get in touch.
