At the heart of great customer service, workplace productivity, and employee satisfaction, enterprises can find one crucial commonality: communication. Connections form the backbone of any business structure. However, the modern world has created so many different methods of communication, that it can be difficult for enterprises to stay ahead of the curve.
Today’s customers and employees alike demand more than the standard voice-only communications of days gone by. People in the modern age expect to be able to communicate through numerous platforms, in a timely, and reliable manner. To accomplish this, the enterprise has begun to call upon unified communications and collaboration strategies to align dispersed teams and transform in the digital age.
What’s Involved in Enterprise UC&C?
Unified communication and collaboration in the enterprise are about bringing the right people together at the right times, through the most appropriate channels. As the marketplace grows increasingly more competitive and agile, UC&C isn’t just a buzzword for modern businesses – it can be the difference between failure and success. In fact, some experts suggest that effective communication and collaboration could be the foundations of all transformation. So, what does the average enterprise UC&C strategy entail?
As with most things in the technology world, there’s no one-size-fits-all strategy for UC&C. Instead, the best transformations happen when companies assess the unique needs of their enterprise and implement systems accordingly. However, most UC&C solutions will include:
- Hosted Voice: While many companies are moving away from audio conferencing as the ultimate form of communication, the enterprise still needs a strategy for making and receiving traditional calls. Whether you’re providing call and contact centre solutions or making sales calls to vendors, your UC&C system needs a voice strategy
- Unified messaging and presence: Presence is crucial in the enterprise, where teams are often working on a highly dispersed basis. In larger organisations, 43% of employees already use instant messaging on the job to improve efficiency, enhance team collaboration, and reduce the reliance on enterprise emails
- Mobile applications: Today, it’s hard to find any enterprise employee that doesn’t already do some of their work from a smartphone. With that in mind, there’s a demand for UC&C solutions to come with their own mobile applications and tools to allow workers to contribute to the business from virtually anywhere
- Conferencing services: Aside from the average audio call, today’s enterprise employees also want access to other types of meeting, including web and video conferencing. Modern UC&C tools are branching out to bring new digital media to the online meeting
- Collaboration tools: Finally, in between scheduled conferences and meetings, employees still need to collaborate. For this, tools like Webex Teams (formerly Cisco Spark), Microsoft Teams, and Slack offer file sharing, and communication opportunities intended to keep the enterprise connected and break down the walls between siloed departments
Why Does the Enterprise Need UC&C?
Ultimately, any enterprise – no matter which verticals it serves – is always on the search for new ways to improve efficiency and productivity. When it comes to improving organisational performance, UC&C is a key part of many digital transformation (DX) strategies, as it eliminates the complexity of diverse communication solutions, and brings employees together on a single-pane-of-glass UI.
In the enterprise, UC&C can speed up time to market, improve customer satisfaction and more, through benefits like:
- Consistent integrated experience: Mobile, email, voice, and web-conferencing are all available on the same application, reducing the need to switch between tools
- Better productivity and collaboration: Eliminate inconsistent communication strategies in favour of a streamlined approach that allows employees to work on the platforms that are best suited to them
- Better user and customer experience: Because employees can work better together, and spend less time on unnecessary activities, end-users get faster resolutions to their problems. Everyone wins with greater experiences all around
In a world where communication is critical, UC&C brings the diverse workforce together, into a single team dedicated to brand success.
