Unified Communications

Close up telephone office keyboard computer mobile telephone on the desk.multitasking employee concept

Unified Communications (UC) Offers Value To Small And Medium-Size Businesses

Small and medium-size businesses face challenges unique to their size and environment. They need to respond quickly to their customers and build long-term satisfaction.

Additionally, the employees require effective communications to improve project completion and reduce business delays. UC addresses the needs of these smaller businesses by improving business agility, accelerating project completion, and increasing overall worker productivity.

Across all industries interviewed, UC benefits include:

Effective team collaboration. UC facilitates work group collaboration and discussions by making it easier for workers to set up meetings, discuss issues, and make decisions more quickly.
Rapid problem resolution. Problems are common to all businesses, and firms that address customer problems immediately — with improved collaboration to solve problems quicker — provide competitive differentiation and improve customer loyalty.
Access to experts. When experts are available for conferencing with customers and solving business problems, they generate higher approval ratings from their customers.
Attract and retain employees. Organizations compete for top employees, and providing a work environment that improves internal and customer communications enables them to attract and retain top performers.
Improve sales performance. New sales proposals often get delayed by internal activities that require decision from various managers who may not be accessible. UC supports a more collaborative environment and helps create a virtual sales team to respond more quickly to customers.
Increase employee productivity. With the ability to reduce delays in reaching co-workers, including remote workers, employees save time in setting up meetings and completing projects.

What You Need to Know about Voice and Conferencing

Combining your company’s voice and data systems makes it easier to keep in touch and share information. By unifying your business’ phone and computer network, team members can easily find each other, wherever they are, and customers and prospects can be quickly routed to the best resources.

As your business grows, IP based communications technology lets you add new employees, remote offices and teleworkers with minimal effort and expense. At each step, your team has the communications tools it needs to help your business succeed.

IMT Brings It All Together

To understand unified communications, consider all the tools that your business uses now: office phone system, mobile phone, fax, Internet, voicemail and likely others. Then, think about all of the productivity applications you use: calendars, conference and meeting clients, e-mail and messaging. Now, instead of separate, distinct tools, they’re all working together as one solution that makes it easy to:

Hold meetings from remote locations using audio, video or Web technology

Help team members find each other right away-no more telephone tag

Access key technologies through wireless devices

Connect customers with the right person at the right time Allow employees to work from anywhere

Easily add and integrate new employees saving you time and money

Safeguard your business from hackers, viruses, and other security risks

Here’s how each piece of a unified communications system — featuring voice and conferencing — works together to make it happen.

IP telephony
Phone service — including dial tone, transfer, hold, phone conferencing and other standard features — connected via your data network. Employees can transfer calls to anyone in the company, regardless of location, and remote employees have access to all phone services through a secured Virtual Private Network (VPN) connection to the office.

Software
Voice and conferencing software lets your employees easily set up conference calls for meetings, share presentations, see each other through video conferencing, and message each other instantly, among other things. All of this becomes available through one, easy-to-use front end.

Presence solutions
No more telephone tag or wasted time trying to reach someone who is out of the office. “Presence” applications (which provide real-time status of who’s available online) let you check the availability, location and contact information of a coworker in real time.

Unified messaging
Imagine getting all your e-mail, voice messages, and faxes right from your e-mail inbox. Unified messaging allows this, giving you an easy way to stay connected with the tools you use everyday.

Rich-media conferencing
Conferencing solutions let remote workers and teams hold conferences using voice, video, the Web or a combination of all three. Rich-media conferencing enables meetings where everyone can participate easily and collaborate better.