Are you an enterprise functional in multiple countries? Or even cities?
Do you have employee base active round the clock?
Are your employees deputed on the field and visit clients?
Do you have clients across the globe? Or you wish to have them across the world?
And the most important question, are you ‘the’ facility manager responsible for the communication infrastructure of your organization?
If answers to these questions are anything affirmative then you must read on…
Communication is the backbone of any successful business; this is a business technology gospel, something that needs no more proof. Today, businesses are not only limited to a single place, but they are also “multi-national” or at least multi-cities. Your head offices might house Administration, Marketing, Accounts, and Human Resources departments but your Productions Units can be a thousand miles away from the headquarters. Dispatch unit, along with production, must be in sync with accounts, sales coordination, and accounts team.
This is very much the requirement of your teams residing at the head office – communicate forecast, order details. Often your marketing and sales teams (Yes! they fall into the same functional category) would want to make international calls to clients (They bring your business and money, that’s why!).
Finally, your leadership team wants to exclusively connect with all the teams at least once (Well, you wish!) for monthly review meetings.
What are your current arrangements for this? Just a PBX? That’s not enough though.
Relying on technology of yesteryears could hinder the efficiency of your organizations’ processes, leading to retarded decision making, high cost for communication and low productivity.
Let’s see how unified communication servers (So-called!) will solve these issues and make your decision making quicker, smarter and consistent, reduce telephony costs and boost employee productivity.
Unified communications simply mean unifying all your mediums and modes of communication rather bind it on a single platform.
Still not clear? Here’s more…
Basically, you use the same communication server to carry out different kinds of communications. They may include outbound trunk calls, internal calls, sending SMS,
instant messaging, linking your email to your voicemail, linking your SMS to your email, video calling, audio conferencing, accessing voicemail servers, using your mobile phone for desk phone calling and the list goes on.
Now, how do you actually do this, that is by having a unified communication server at your office or offices (if you are a multi-national or will be one, soon)?
Unified communications, as a concept came into this world long back (long back) but most organizations could not adopt it then, that’s why you must be reading this now (who said techies can’t joke?). The reason being this amazing technology is more beneficial now than it was earlier. Now, the majority of communications devices and protocols are IP (Internet Protocol) or SIP (Session Initiated Protocol) compliant. So what? Well, so now communication got better, your voice calls can now be transmitted over as IP Packets. (Yes, you can Google it!) This increased the quality of voice and video communications.
With IP at the core of unified communications these are the top benefits you can offer your organization with: (And ask for some recognition!)
Better Your Employee Collaboration
With UC services you allow your employees to collaborate and communicate from where they are. Just interface your two different unified communication servers or IP phone users with the main server located at your head office (Want to Google this?).
A setup like this means, no matter where your multiple locations are geographical, every employee is just that THREE digit intercom dial away from you.
Continuous Business Communications
Your clientele can be local or international having the flexibility to call from any communication network like ISDN PRI, GSM, or VoIP. This should allow you to choose from the best possible trunk, which can also be cost-effective. Similarly, multiple numbers can be made available to clients and prospects on the basis of the region where clients/prospects are located.
Apart from this, another ease with unified communications is that organizations can use the same network arrangement for voice as they do for data. Easy interface with fiber network using fiber-to-Ethernet converter makes the technology the most preferred choice for facility and project heads to opt for UC.
The convenience of Business Communications
Call management becomes a piece of cake. With IP at core many call management applications, built-in as well as third party, can be integrated with UC server and the operator can:
Identify Calls before Answering, Reduce Call Volume, Automate Call Treatment, Not Change Accustomed Dialing Patterns, and ultimately enhance convenience and productivity.
Stay Connected to Field Employees
Another valuable advantage of UC is that it enables what people call B.Y.O.D (Bring Your Own Device), basically mobile softphone. Essentially, what it means is that you can install a mobile application on your sales team’s phones and they can receive and make calls like they do from their communication endpoints (had they been sitting inside an office). Other additional features are Presence Information Sharing, Screen Sharing, Instant Messaging and Video Calling (Now the sales team just can’t escape, they got to receive your calls).
If at all this was educative and you know someone can benefit from this do share it with them.