The Impactful Benefits of Unified Communications

Providing the right technology and tools to your employees is critical, especially regarding communications. Your team needs flexibility in the way that they exchange ideas and collaborate, and you can find this with unified communications. The benefits of unified communications can positively impact how your staff works. Making the switch to a unified communications platform is a smart investment. Find out why.

What Is Unified Communications?

Unified communications describes a platform that integrates a phone system, video conferencing, chat, screen sharing, and file management into one hub. It’s a turnkey system that enables any type of communication activity. It lives in the cloud, so it is accessible to all your team members as long as they have an internet connection.

Why Switch to Unified Communications

The benefits of unified communications have the capacity to affect your business’s day to day, making it easier and more seamless for your employees to interact with each other, customers, and partners. Here’s why you should consider switching to unified communications.

Improve Productivity and Efficiency

Every business wants to improve workflows and remove bottlenecks. When you do, productivity and efficiency are improved substantially. Unified communications makes it easier for your employees to do their job. They’ll save time on tasks throughout the day, including:

• Being able to take calls from anywhere
• Quickly sharing files with teammates to work on collaboratively, instead of using an endless email thread
• Receiving communications directly in your email like voicemail or faxes
• Starting video meetings in a click when important issues come up that need a swift resolution

By offering your team this technology, they can get more done in a day and alleviate some of the challenges with communication you may currently be facing. When employees can collaborate better with technology, what once took days of back and forth can now be resolved much more efficiently

Reduce Spend on Communications

If you are currently using legacy phones or hosting any communications tools on-site, chances are, this is taking a major chunk out of your IT budget. Everything on a unified communications platform leverages the internet to work. The phone system will be Voice over IP (VoIP) and can integrate with all the other tools.

By switching, you can save in multiple ways. First, there will be no hardware or server infrastructure to build or update. Second, any time you want to add a user, you can do so on your own from your dashboard, which doesn’t require a service call. Third, your cost will be the same every month, instead of being unpredictable, allowing you to budget better.

Enhance Customer Service

Being able to better serve your customers and improve their experience is vital to any company’s sustainability. Your current communications tools, however, may not be doing you any favors and could be hurting your customer service efforts.

Unified communications gives employees the ability to respond to customers no matter where they are. They’ll be able to see incoming calls, chats, or emails from any device.

Further, a platform allows you to integrate your CRM (customer relationship management) software. When any customer contacts your business, whoever is helping them can see all the notes and important information associated with the contact. This leads to faster resolutions and shows your customers you know their needs.

Empower a Remote Workforce

The workforce of the 21st century continues to evolve, and working remotely has become a winning model for companies and employees. Hiring remote employees allows you to look for talent beyond your metro area and is attractive to many in the workforce. However, you may have doubts about how to ensure remote workers have the right tools.

Unified communications empowers your remote workforce with every aspect of communication in one platform. The remote employee only needs an internet connection to have access to your network and be able to use all the features to be a productive part of the team.

Scale on Your Terms

Another advantage of unified communications is the ability to scale as your business grows without challenges. Using traditional telephony, this isn’t possible without a significant investment, and it’s not fast or easy. Every communication tool will be integrated into one interface, so it’s easy to add more users and features on your own.

The benefits of unified communications can transform how you communicate and collaborate. It’s a cost-effective approach that can yield a great return on investment. Learn more about unified communications by exploring Intermedia Unite.

Kirsten Barta

Kirsten Barta is Sr Marketing Communications Manager at Intermedia