So, you’re looking into integrating Unified Communication into your business. You’ve heard this phrase “Unified Communication” over and over and you’re finally intrigued by the buzzword. But where to start?
Below are some of the most popular concerns regarding Unified Communications. If your question isn’t answered, if you would like more clarification on the matter, or if you’re totally hooked and want more unified communication in your business structure, contact us and we’ll get you started!
How can Hosted Unified Communication help my business scale?
1) First, you want to assess your company’s overall growth opportunities and prioritize them. For example, would you first want to invest in IT. You want to ask in regards of your business, “how can IT best deliver value to scale the business?”
2) Next, you want to reconsider how you think of on-prem solutions. Some businesses still feel that it is the only safe and reliable option available. However, in reality, cloud provides many businesses a huge competitive advantage.
3) Lastly, you would want to meticulously conduct an evaluation of your business’s network capability in regards to support the level of growth you want to accomplish. You would also want to make sure that you have, and are ready to invest the required amount to prepare your IT. Only then can you set realistic and achievable goals.
5 Requirements for Application Integration with Hosted Unified Communication: make sure it will complement and will efficiently be integrated into the other modes of communication in your business.
1) Typical and primary modes of communication for most businesses include the following and would require seamless integration: voice conferencing, instant messaging, video conferencing, voicemail, email, etc.
2) Set aside 2 sets of need: horizontal and vertical
3) Having solid integration among your current modes of communication and a hosted Unified Communication requires that applications work across both fixed and mobile environments. This is an absolute must these days, especially with how busy employees are with work, travel, and multitask.
4) It needs to have the ability to handle big data outputs without any lag, crashes, etc.
5) This may not seem like a big deal, but sometimes the appeal of “ease” is looked over. But it is highly necessary that in order for your business to have a successful application integration with hosted Unified Communication, it needs to provide employees a single sign-on. Why? Because that way, employees will adopt the new technology quicker and more willingly.
And how will integrating Unified Communication with other applications in your business drive productivity for your business?
1) Overall integration of current modes of communication with newer, more advanced applications offers a richer palette of communication tools for employees.
2) Voice is still the preferred real time mode and VoIP/Unified Communication provides more options to use it than legacy telephony
3) Mobility is a big deal, and your business needs to be equipped with it in order to keep up. By integrating telephony with hosted Unified Communication will indefinitely help extend collaboration capabilities, and move it from just the desktop to anywhere beyond. Mobile integration also goes hand in hand with businesses promoting BYOD, which is proving to push employees to be more productive since they are using their own tools on their own terms.
…So What Next?
1) Actions you can take right now to determine how to get the most value with integrating current modes of communications with hosted Unified Communication. Evaluate with current applications are most important, which ones are used most, which ones are hardly used, user platform easiness, etc.
2) Evaluate how these applications are being used and to what capacity. Then see where the pitfalls are and determine how Unified Communication could mend the situation. You also want to assess how well the integration can be done on site vs. what hosted Unified Communication can provide your business.
3) Finally, determine what you want to achieve in the end, and then see what work styles will need to be changed, added, or taken away from the flow of your business’s operations.
If you’re interested in upgrading your business, look into how we can help!