Businesses today are faced with an increasingly unpredictable world to operate in. In times of constant evolution—of customers, conditions and contexts – it’s become a task to keep up.
One way businesses are approaching this issue is by leveraging modern business communication and collaboration tools like UCaaS, with the ultimate aim of driving efficacy and productivity growth within the organisation.
There are, however, many aspects of UCaaS and its use cases that merit attention. Let’s take a look at what UCaaS is and how it can drive productivity gains for businesses of all stripes.
The role of UCaaS as an advanced communication tool
Unified Communications as a Service, or UCaaS, is a part of the fast-growing Software as a Service (SaaS) family. Businesses have always had a deep and broad set of internal communications needs. This is especially true for large-scale operations that require a lot of internal coordination. The entry of UCaaS has changed the landscape of business communications that earlier consisted of independent and disconnected platforms.
Consider this: Previously, any meeting details discussed over text had to be manually fed and scheduled onto the calendars and then sent as email invites. With UCaaS, all the tools of communication—texts, video chats, emails, voice calls—are unified in one coherent platform.
This makes the transfer of data, files and records absolutely seamless between different mediums, thereby enhancing efficiency and productivity to open up newer vistas of customer experience.
UCaaS solutions cater to all kinds of communications, with clients as well as within your organisation. There is increased collaboration between all the parties involved across different channels.
You can easily facilitate large client call flows, send out your brand message through broadcasts, and also maintain flawless internal coordination all the while.
Essentially, both, your employees and your customers experience the best quality of interactions possible.
Connecting, collaborating and driving business success on UCaaS
We’ve come to witness how businesses across the world, irrespective of their sector, have embarked on a journey of digitalisation. Consumers’ interactions with brands are now happening almost exclusively on the Internet, especially considering the prolonged store shutdowns. This has had serious implications for businesses and the way that they operate.
The temporary changes over the last few months have affected human behaviour and preferences at the core. Therefore, they’ve essentially become permanent evolutions. This means that even when the pandemic is long gone, business communication, collaboration and overall success would continue to be driven by advanced platforms like UCaaS solutions.
Premise-based legacy solutions are nowhere close to being adequate for the entire range of novel organisational responsibilities. Now the question is ‘when’, and not ‘if’ for businesses.
Connecting
Archaic, individual tools for communicating simply don’t cut it anymore—not in a world where service requests pop up 24/7 and even a slight delay in response can cost very dearly for the business.
The integrated UCaaS platform allows all the verticals of your organisation to ‘talk’ to each other and enables a seamless flow of data.
Of course, you cannot ignore the importance of the cloud in the field of communications. All your operations under UCaaS are happening via the Internet. What does this mean for your business though?
Easier maintenance, larger data capacity, faster collaboration, safer data transfer, fewer points of failure, and regular automated backups all lead to a successful and effortless business communication strategy.
Collaborating
This heavily builds on the connecting aspect of UCaaS solutions.Businesses today have to grapple with a complex set of challenges while trying to maintain a sense of operational continuity. UCaaS solutions greatly allow for efficient collaboration which is the need of the hour for today’s remote businesses.
Employees these days work from a wide variety of locations, not from one head office as was the norm earlier. UCaaS allows the staff to communicate seamlessly, regardless of location, channels, devices, etc, as long as there is a stable Internet connection.
In fact, if you have large-scale operations, different branches can also collaborate for an overall efficient business plan.
Business success in the years to come
One thing the COVID-19 pandemic has taught us is that life can really hurl lemons at you, and you will constantly unearth obstacles to tackle. The central challenge that businesses face is how to play along with these emerging realities while maintaining efficiency and productivity growth.
This, again, is where UCaaS solutions come to assume an important role. Apart from the features previously described, you can also integrate your phone system with tools like Customer Relation Management (CRM) or data analytics software to massively expand utility beyond core business purposes.
For future business success, firms first need to work on reducing operational costs. This need is met with UCaaS’s cost-effectiveness owing to its lack of extensive hardware set-up. Additionally, since a lot of routine tasks are automated, you save agents’ time and actually need not hire extra people for basic tasks.
Another aspect to consider is agility in operations. This means you need to be ready to accommodate any changes in your organisation, like downsizing because of the lockdowns or rapid upsizing after making a huge deal. Unified communications platforms are incredibly scalable and flexible, making your system perfectly adaptable for any kind of need.
Conclusion
The verdict is out. Organisations are adopting cloud-based business communication platforms by the droves. Unified communications are a near necessity at this point for any business that wants to ensure quality customer experience, both for today and for tomorrow.
In consonance with advanced communication tools, UCaaS is all set to elevate how you go about doing business. The time to leverage it is now!
Olivia Trott is a technical writer at Acefone, prominent contact centre solutions provider. Olivia is an outgoing person who enjoys writing, is an SEO enthusiast, and often interacts with others in intellectual conversations. She enjoys listening to music in her free time.