UC provides companies with incredible agility, scalability, and flexibility in an environment where business conversations are constantly changing.
However, to leverage the full benefits the UC landscape offers, companies need the right strategy to deploy UC tools and automate transformation. Automation in the UC landscape isn’t just a nice-to-have solution for many larger businesses but a critical part of maintaining an efficient, highly productive network of team members.
Used correctly, automation can assist with streamlining the onboarding and offboarding process for staff, enhancing employee experiences, and enabling rapid transformation. The right tools and strategies also allow companies to take advantage of hybrid and remote work trends by making possible zero-touch provisioning and deployment.
The Steps for Successful UC Deployment and Automation
While automating various aspects of the UC environment can generate many positive benefits for business leaders, implementing the right workflows and managing the UC environment can also be a complex process for beginners.
For most companies, the first step in successfully automating UC deployment and management will be choosing the right UC solution for the needs of a digitally-transforming team. This means assessing a digital workforce’s specific communication and collaboration requirements of a digital workforce, and matching those demands to an available UC solution.
For instance, Microsoft Teams stands as one of the most popular platforms for UC in the modern landscape, offering users a combination of various productivity tools, communication apps, and innovative features in one easy-to-use environment.
Once companies have chosen their UC offering, the next step is finding ways to manage and automate deployment, development, and employee empowerment.
Step 1: Invest in Digital Workplace Management
To support evolving teams in the hybrid and remote work world, companies need to move away from hands-on deployment, provisioning, and management strategies and shift towards a more digitised approach. UC automation – and specifically a digital workplace management solution – can help with this.
Digital Workplace Management platforms provide companies and business leaders with an end-to-end environment where they can congregate various UC vendors, integrations, and tools. These all-in-one ecosystems offer companies central control over the unified communications environment rather than requiring them to use multiple admin portals and systems.
The result is a more comprehensive, convenient, and repeatable solution for deploying and provisioning communication tools in any environment, no matter how many employees there are to support. Digital workplace management platforms keep businesses agile and flexible, with a customisable and centralised solution for maintaining visibility throughout the ecosystem. Organisations can leverage role-based access controls to ensure central IT teams can assign limitations and control the overall UC network. At the same time, individual business units can maintain autonomy for the day-to-day use of their unique environments.
Step 2: Leverage Automation Management
An effective digital workplace management tool can not only give companies more control over how UC solutions are deployed and provisioned, but it can also provide a way to automate various complex tasks. Most unified communications platforms now consist of multiple applications, interfaces, vendors, methodologies, and tools to manage.
A Digital Workplace Management solution with built-in automation management provides companies with a convenient way to create their workflows for provisioning and team controls. For instance, the VOSS Automate product suite from VOSS allows organisations to leverage sophisticated workflows, tailor-made to suit their businesses, without the need for complex coding.
The solution virtualises the operational control panel for the UC space so professional supervisors, admins, and team leaders can manage, coordinate, and optimise service delivery. Users can adapt the underlying models, workflows, and templates to suit their needs with quick and convenient tools.
The agile framework even ensures any customer-specific adaptation or integration doesn’t damage the company’s ability to maintain and preserve its communication architecture. The highly agile framework can adapt rapidly to suit any business and minimise manual workloads.
Step 3: Maintain Excellent Ease of Use
Finally, companies can use digital workplace management tools to preserve phenomenal user experiences and productivity. Customisable interfaces and admin portals allow companies to control exactly what each team member or group can do within the ecosystem, keeping compliance issues to a minimum.
The VOSS Automate ecosystem has flexible interface options, allowing users to select administrative tools for business needs. Companies can map their organisational structure to the needs of their collaboration platform. There’s even a self-service solution for end-user control so that individual team members can personalise their features, services, and devices.
Not only does the right digital workplace management tool significantly improve the experience in deploying and managing UC solutions, but it can also ensure companies can adapt and evolve at their own pace. Within the platform, business leaders and non-technical administrators can create new workflows and implement integrations whenever they choose.
The Benefits of Using a Digital Workforce Management Solution
Implementing comprehensive UC automation solutions for deployment and provisioning can seem complex. However, with the right tools and services, like digital workforce management platforms, companies can rapidly accelerate migrations, avoid disruption, and maintain service continuity when bringing new team members on board.
Bill Dellara, VP of Product at VOSS Solutions, said: “Managing a range of multi-vendor applications and services in a UC solution can become complex and requires highly technical and centralised IT management.
“This introduces a lot of unnecessary cost as well as delays in administering day-to-day MACDs. VOSS collects all this complexity inside a single portal, creating zero-touch workflows that allow changes to be made simply and rapidly by service desk staff and even delegated out to different regions or parts of the organisation.
“This saves organisations time and money, and frees technical staff to work on more challenging tasks.”
Companies can cater to their specific user needs with a highly flexible ecosystem capable of adapting to any UC environment, no matter how small or complex. The right solution gives businesses increased flexibility, a lower resource overhead, and reduced manual errors, all while ensuring better levels of compliance and productivity.
