5 reasons to embrace Unified Communications (UCaaS) in 2018

30 Nov 5 reasons to embrace Unified Communications (UCaaS) in 2018

1. It’s the environmentally-friendly choice! Using cloud-delivered managed services can help your business “go green” and reduce its environmental impact. Although the cloud has the power requirements of a sub-continent, its distributed nature is the silver lining! By claiming a small portion of the cloud, you’re helping to make the world – and your business – a greener place. That’s because the portion of the service provider’s energy usage that’s attributed to your company’s services is quite small, particularly when compared to the amount of energy you’d use to run the same services yourself. Greenpeace published a report on “how companies are creating the green Internet,” and it included an eye-opening statistic: if “the cloud” were a country, it would rank sixth in the world in terms of electricity consumption, not far behind Russia and India. Albeit, the Greenpeace report also had some good news: many of the world’s largest data centers and cloud service providers (including Facebook, Microsoft, and Salesforce) are now running on renewable energy, or at least have implemented a long-term commitment to being 100% renewably powered. 1. It’s the environmentally-friendly choice! Using cloud-delivered managed services can help your business “go green” and reduce its environmental impact. Although the cloud has the power requirements of a sub-continent, its distributed nature is the silver lining! By claiming a small portion of the cloud, you’re helping to make the world – and your business – a greener place. That’s because the portion of the service provider’s energy usage that’s attributed to your company’s services is quite small, particularly when compared to the amount of energy you’d use to run the same services yourself. Greenpeace published a report on “how companies are creating the green Internet,” and it included an eye-opening statistic: if “the cloud” were a country, it would rank sixth in the world in terms of electricity consumption, not far behind Russia and India. Albeit, the Greenpeace report also had some good news: many of the world’s largest data centers and cloud service providers (including Facebook, Microsoft, and Salesforce) are now running on renewable energy, or at least have implemented a long-term commitment to being 100% renewably powered.

2. Flexibility with productivity – Unified Communications enables a mobile and flexible workforce by providing users with all the communications channels they need on one secure platform, with a consistent experience across a desktop or mobile device. Your employees can participate in video conferences while working from home, receive work voicemails via email while traveling and see if their co-workers are at their desks and available to take calls. It allows users to be in touch with anyone, anywhere, at any time. By bringing together voice, messaging, web and video conferencing, with presence information, UC ensures that staff can communicate with their colleagues in a way that best suits them, speeding up business and increasing employee satisfaction.

3. Cost control – The savings can be significant when businesses no longer need to pay for and support individual tools, products or equipment. With built-in HD videoconferencing, companies can also develop closer collaboration with colleagues, clients, partners or prospects while reducing travel costs. A pure cloud solution can also greatly reduce the amount of on premise hardware that needs to be supported, as well as providing the flexibility to rapidly scale up without making a big capital investment, for example, adding extra customer service agents for a retailer during a busy sales period. In addition, by allowing companies to optimize their use of office space, UCaaS can reduce real estate costs.

4. A better customer experience – Customers today are informed! Some analysts say that 70% of B2B purchasing decision are made before the customer even formally contacts you. Tech-savvy customers know how to find and secure the best deal and will simply move on to a company that satisfies their needs if they can’t get an instant answer to their query on the channel of their choice. Waiting is not an option for today’s time-pressed consumer. And to provide customer service excellence you need to have the right technology and the right culture. A UC implementation can dramatically improve the customer experience, providing support for multi-channel and features such as intelligent routing, so customers reach a company expert to answer their query for fast, first-time resolution.

5. Collaboration accelerates innovation and growth – UCaaS systems open the door to a world of empowering communications and collaboration tools for employees, and analytic insights and efficiencies to business teams. For example, a workflow could be created that extracts caller ID information to determine if an incoming call to a sales agent is from a customer. If so, the workflow can pull up the buyer’s recent orders from the company’s ERP system to display in the UCaaS platform for easy reference during the conversation. The increased integration can help your company grow faster and provide mutual support networks between organizations and internal departments. Moreover, this increase in productivity leads to innovation that creates competitive advantage through knowledge, good practice, and information sharing.