Five Things to Consider While Implementing Unified Communications Strategy - Tata Tele Business Services

5 Things to Consider While Implementing Unified Communications Strategy to Drive Business

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Unified Communications (UC) is the integration of multiple communication channels for the optimisation of business processes. It involves specific        protocols and strategies to combine real-time and non-real-time communications with the organisation’s operations. The integration is based on presence capabilities and builds a seamless user interface and experience across different devices and channels.

The fact that it improves both internal and external communications makes UC a profitable proposition for businesses. It enables an organisation’s workforce to connect and collaborate efficiently with colleagues, vendors, customers and business partners regardless of their location and the media channel they use.

Let us now look into the top 5 factors that an organisation must consider while designing its UC strategy:

1. Understand the different components that Unified Communication embraces

UC is not a single tool or technology – it is a solution that combines an assortment of previously siloed communication channels to improve how individuals, teams and organisations complete their tasks.

A UC solution may comprise:

• Call control, and/or switch integration
• Online and telephony presence with a rules engine
• Messaging apps: E-mail, chat, voice mail, SMS
• Web conferencing
• Document sharing apps
• Mobility
• Unified client: on desktop, mobile device, softphone, or web portal

Just as there are multiple UC products, there may be numerous vendors supplying them. The integration of applications from different sources and their interoperability is the key to a successful UC deployment. The components to be combined can include Microsoft applications, Google apps, CRM apps, and the products offered by mobility vendors. It can be challenging to make such diverse components work harmoniously, and organisations must, therefore, rope in an experienced UC vendor for seamless deployment of the integrated system.

1. Check how end-users leverage communications tools now and will do in the future

The early adopters of UC systems have already realised its advantages for their business processes – increased mobility, better collaboration, reduced costs and travel time, and enhanced customer service.

On integrating UC with their operations and applications, businesses streamline communications and reduce or eliminate human latency. It makes their employees more responsive, productive and efficient. They can use UC tools to share data and documents seamlessly. This enables shorter project timelines and quicker time-to-market and eventually impacts the bottom line of the enterprise.

With more organisations hiring remote workers and promoting bring-your-own-device (BYOD) culture, the need for mobility will keep increasing. While leveraging UC to enable anywhere/anytime interactions, they can progressively reduce their physical endpoints, such as desktop phones and PBX hardware.

The UC space will also grow smarter with time. This drive towards intelligent meeting room will be powered by combining UC platforms with technologies such as AI and machine learning.

1. Evaluate how the organisation’s contact centre fits in its Unified Communication strategy and transforms customer interactions

A key area where companies should deploy UC systems is their primary customer-facing domain – the contact centre. When applications and information sources are unified, agents do not have to juggle between different systems and can keep their messages consistent for both internal and external communications.

Furthermore, while switching between disparate systems, agents can get distracted and look into records that do not even belong to the customer they are speaking to. This not only spoils the experience for the caller but also brings the risk of divulging sensitive information that applies to a different customer. UC prevents such data breaches by unifying calls from customers’ registered numbers to their account information. When someone calls in, their data gets displayed automatically on the agent’s screen.

UC also extends the capabilities of presence technology by helping employees connect with the right subject matter experts on the right device – phone/IM to get the correct information – while performing their duties.

1. Assess the expected ROI to make the right business case for a Unified Communication implementation

The benefits of UC and its ROI can be quite different for users at various levels. While basic UC improves personal productivity of workers, the addition of collaborative capabilities helps to extend benefits for an entire workgroup and begins to increase the ROI. And when organisations incorporate communications-enabled business processes (CEBP), the benefits scale even further for business transformation.

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In a broad categorisation, the two kinds of savings that UC affords are:

Hard Savings – By reducing CapEx, monthly communication tools costs and activity-based costs such as cost per minute for international costs

Soft Savings – Cost benefits of the subscription model, reduced information security risks, improved business agility, more satisfied customers and employees

These lead to better ROI and profitability.

1. The path to Unified Communication deployment

There is no uniform way to deploy and operate UC systems. Each user organisation can choose the integration of tools and solutions as per its unique needs, business goals, operational processes and existing infrastructure.

The majority of the companies, however, begin by emphasising on user productivity and integrate their multiple communication modes while also adding presence technology for effective click-to-communicate capabilities. Once they realise the benefits of such integrations, they upgrade to more advanced ways of leveraging UC for their organisation – such as CEPB, which, when embedded in a business process, reduces human latency.

Then again, other companies have already evaluated the value of UC comprehensively and go directly to business process integration when they deploy the system at their workplace. It is, therefore, good to look at the business goals and then determine the best approach and pace for the journey to UC.

As businesses try new strategies to improve their sales, reduce costs and improve customer relationships, a proven way to achieve these goals is to make their employees more efficient and productive. They must transform the way workers perform their duties, and this becomes possible when UC is tied to enterprise applications and processes.

To know all about Tata Tele Business Services UC solutions and how they exponentially support organisations, contact our team at 1800-266-1515.