Understanding Unified communications and collaboration – From Scratch
Unified communications and collaboration or UC&C, you must be aware of this term, as a business, are using an advanced communication suite. Its ideal adaption enables an enterprise to endow customers, teams, employees, and management with a streamlined communication change that lays the foundation of success in the long run.
Here, we will try to explain UC&C at a deeper level and will tell you about where it is heading in the future.
What is Unified communications and collaboration?
Unified communications and collaboration refers to a combination of communication technologies joined by a single interface acting as an integrated platform. By using UC&C in the ecosystem, a business can overcome communication inefficiencies and challenges at every level. Its main aim is to make your company more connected, sorted, and productive than ever before.
One of the main reasons behind such a high affinity of enterprise toward UC&C is that it enables a business to experience the same sort of high-end and unified user-experience all across the platforms including laptop, smartphone, tablet, and PC. Hence, its functionality is device-independent.
What UC&C comprises of?
Many communication tools join hands together and form a fully functional UC&C for an enterprise. Some of the key components of UC&C are:
- Email and voicemail
- Calendars and scheduling tools
- Voice and telephony/ desktop sharing
- Real-time communications
- Web, audio and video conferencing
- Instant messaging
What benefits does UC&C render to the businesses?
The benefits of UC&C are wide-spread and multi-facet:
Higher accessibility and productivity
As we have already mentioned that UC&C is device-independent and can be at your service through any of the dealing data-driven devices, it enables your team and employees to work without any limitations. They can share a file on their way back home, attend a meeting while enjoying coffee in the café, and can access all official data while they are out of the office. Such sort of availability definitely improves their productivity and revenue.
Faster and responsive service
With UC&C, everything is on your fingertips. You will be notified as soon as a call/message comes. Hence, you can improve your response time and deliver time-bound assistance.
Reduced cost
When all things are at a single place, you can easily save a fortune on telecom, travel, and IT expenditures. Also, if you are using UC&C over cloud telephony then you need not bear the system maintenance and update costing. It’s the headache of your service provider.
High customer satisfaction
UC&C enables a business to become extra attentive towards their customers’ needs. They have a response quickly and make data-driven decisions. With features like IVR, auto call attendant, and on-hold music, they endow the callers with great calling experience. All of these attributes towards improving your customer satisfaction. And we all know that the higher the customer satisfaction the better is the sales figure.
Are there any challenges with UC&C?
No one can deny the fact that collaborative communications is the backbone of a successful enterprise. However, it comes with a few challenges that shouldn’t be ignored if you are using an old-school network. You are likely to face the wrath of latency and congestion with poor or overloaded network infrastructure. However, you can easily overcome these issues by adopting hyper-converged networks.
The use cases of UC&C
The penetration of collaborative communications is very deep. Any business that wants to have streamline communication is at its disposal can easily adopt this modern technology. In an enterprise ecosystem that deals with direct customer dealing and product development, UC&C is indeed a great help as it offers streamlined communication across the channels while keeping the cost under control. It has proved its efficiency in reducing the response waiting time and customer churn.
Education is another sector where unified communication has proved nothing but a blessing. With its deployment, the education industry managed to offer a unified and online learning experience to the students across the globe. Teachers can take online sessions, conduct review sessions, do real-time documents/assignment/ test-results/file sharing, and arrange live streaming sessions with the students physically present in any apart of the world.
On the same note, it has actually helped the healthcare industry offers more personalized and time-bound health services to the patients. Using the UC&C solutions, patients can consult with the doctors from the comfort of their home using the real-time reports. Its time scheduling tools can also streamline the appointment process.
The Conclusion
Unified communication is that one tool that you need by your side to revolutionize your business communication, pump-up your team’s productivity, and offer par excellent customer support. Without this, you may have a tough time to turn your dream of impeccable success into reality. Take the necessary step and start using UC&C now.
