Authored by Rajiv Thakore, Manager- Product Marketing, Matrix ComSec Pvt. Ltd.
No, we are not driving your attention to the fact that telephony solution installed at your office is slowly nearing its extinction date. But recently, did you lose any customer interaction due to the outage of wired lines? Are you experiencing frequent connectivity loss when it comes to communicating with mobile workforce working at remote locations? Are your employees constantly struggling between screens to access multiple business applications, which ultimately hamper their productivity? If answer to any of the above mentioned questions is affirmative, then it’s high time you studied the Unified Communication solutions available in the market, and pick one that suits your requirements.
Defining Unified Communications(UC)...
Unified Communication is basically a technology that merges real-time modes of communication such as conferencing, instant messaging and desktop sharing with non-real-time communication means like email, SMS, fax and voicemail. In a nutshell, UC is a bundle of different applications which are carefully combined to offer consistent and convenient business communication experience. The solution is a platform that offers facilities and features required for communication, collaboration and organization of dispersed business processes.
Signs Indicating Shift to UC is NOW Indispensable for your Organization
High attrition rate and failed retention is the tale of every other company now. The present workforce is expected to manage many profiles and ensure quality services. If you are struggling to offer all the resources required for generating desired output, then UC is your pick. The technology offers integrated access of voice, video and data. Since UC unifies numerous modes of communication, it is easy for IT and admin staff to maintain and monitor health of the solution deployed.
Opening branch offices at distant locations to cover entire geography is the tried and tested success mantra for corporates now. If you are thinking of following the same bandwagon then it’s time for you to reexamine the deployed communication infrastructure. Keeping UC platform at core of the solution is an advisable investment in this scenario. By connecting over IP, you can bring multiple locations on the same network,ensuring uniform connectivity and access of call management features across the enterprise.
Management of multiple resources for availing different functionalities is apparently a strenuous task. Well, carefully picking a UC solution vendor can put all these hassles at bay. There are many players in the market that offer different applications such as presence sharing, instant messaging, mobility extensions, voicemail and video telephony on a single system. Investing in one such solution is an advisable decision for eliminating the needs of handling multiple vendors.
Do you want to kick start your financial year with a merger or acquisition of a new company? Not sure how will you manage communication flow? Unified Communication solution turns out to be a savior in this situation as well. Most of the UC platforms offer features of flexibility and scalability. Therefore, adding or removing users or allotting a set of facilities to one particular extension becomes easy. Since the systems can be easily managed by a user-friendly interface, IT and administrative staff can program devices irrespective of their locations.
In contemporary environment there may arise a situation wherein analog lines can’t be extended to a certain remote location. UC platforms having in-skin GSM or VoIP facilities are the best options in this case. Since both of these networks are latest, they offer benefits of wireless connectivity along with easy and cost-effective access to the latest call management features. With deployment of an IP enabled platform in a multi-location scenario, sharing of calling trunks become easy which can help you drastically cut down telephony and maintenance costs. Additionally, access of multiple connectivity options from a single UC platform ensures minimum involvement of hardware,and hence monitoring and maintenance is not a tedious task.
There may have been many occasions where you lost the customer due to unavailability of adequate number of channels for establishment of the call. Sometimes, you might have dropped an ongoing call because of power outage or a glitch in the processing card of the PBX. UC solution supplied with redundancy feature is one of the ideal solutions for the scenario. With redundant Unified Communication solution in place, you can ensure continuous communication because the system is programmed to route the entire process through secondary power supply and processing unit inserted in the system.
Setting up a call center unit calls for installation of a high-end PBX. For proper management of heavy call traffic, employees need an interface which offers the facility to attend/place calls from their laptops and computers. The decision makers can invest in a UC platform that supports TAPI interface, which is one of the popular and feature-rich protocols used by contact center agents these days. One can also purchase a telephony solution that offers collaborative features such as access of email and calling client from the same interface. This solution eliminates the employees’ need of juggling between interfaces and enables them to manage email as well as telephonic conversations from the same screen.
For offices receiving heavy call traffic,dropped and poor quality of calls is a usual complaint. Using legacy platforms and inadequate bandwidth of calling channels are two main reasons for the call quality issues. You can resolve the same by updating old communication infrastructure with a Unified Communication solution. Utilization of latest network protocols will enable you to deliver superior call quality and ensure enhanced customer experience. With PBX having voicemail or latest call recording features, you can keep a close check on time in which customer query is resolved. One may use the same feature to record genuine feedbacks.
There are many other signs that your current communication solution is showing to indicate its extinction date. You need to keep a track of the same and start scouting the market to revamp network infrastructure at your facility. You can evaluate communication solution on the basis of scalability, flexibility, and support for legacy networks and call management features offered. You can also count pre-sales and after-sales support, hardware requirement and licensing structure as important pillars for selection of a Unified Communication solution.
