We’d like to take a moment to talk to the hold-outs. If you still have an on-premise phone system, this article is for you. Unified Communications, also known as UC, UCaaS, or cloud voice, can vastly improve communications with your customers and across your employee base, spanning geographies, and supporting all devices.
Here are a few concrete examples of how your business can improve with UCaaS:
1) Stay Reachable From Anywhere (example: Sales Teams)
Sales teams hit the road to do their jobs. They meet with customers, often at varied locations, and cultivate relationships with their community networks. While on the go, sales must also stay in touch with other customers in their portfolio, their boss, and their company’s contact center to address any customer issues they can help with. Sales simply cannot be tied to a desk phone or a voicemail system.
A UCaaS platform untethers sales from their desks and puts mobility at their fingertips. They now have mobile applications that turn their smartphones into their business phone extensions. Their new desktop applications turn their computers into their phone extensions too. Call, message, meet, text – UCaaS enables sales teams – and really everyone in the organization – to remain reachable anytime they’re on the move.
2) Protect Mobile Privacy (example: Remote Employees)
Most employees are now working on a flexible schedule, spending work time in the office, at home, or wherever their lives take them. This hybrid work environment means that you need a virtual, digital, online response to keep employees connected, communicating, and collaborating, without disclosing personal contact information to keep everyone connected.
UCaaS solves this confidentiality problem by providing each employee with a single professional number that can do it all. This means all phone calls, texts, instant messages, and voicemails go through one phone number, enabling staff to keep personal and work conversations separate and preventing personal numbers from being exposed. You can reach your employees on their professional phone number, regardless of where they’re working, what device they’re on, or what form of communication works best.
3) Improve Efficiency, Productivity, and Just-in-Time Communication (multiple examples)
Imagine that you handle incoming calls for a major retailer.
At the start of every holiday season, your contact center fields a large volume of customers calling, emailing, texting, or using social media to reach customer service for new orders, to request product details, or for particulars such as store hours. The increased traffic requires additional staff each holiday season, and the IT team has to set up complicated back-end systems just to make it all work.
UCaaS Contact Center provides intelligent routing, multi-line hunting with queueing, automated supervisor reports, and dashboard views to more efficiently handle large amounts of traffic during peak seasons. It’s a true win-win:
- Customers can quickly get their questions answered
- Your customer service team has the functionality and insight to administer effective call management
- The IT team saves time and can focus on other priorities
How many times have you been on a call in the office, but need to leave mid-call?
You hang up your desk phone and call in with your cell phone, missing a couple of key department updates.
UCaaS means that your mobile and desktop apps operate as one, and empower staff to “jump” calls to and from their cell phone, desktop, and desk phone, guaranteeing a seamless communications transition experience on the go.
Can you easily send urgent public messages?
From time to time, you’ll need to communicate urgently to your entire global staff and to your customers. IT admins managing an on-prem system can struggle with outgoing public messages because they are unable to change call settings or set up custom voice messages without going onsite or calling a vendor – causing confusion when your phone system and website aren’t communicating the same, accurate information.In emergency situations, UCaaS’s auto attendant feature helps you proactively respond to events with better communication. Multiple auto attendants can be set up at each location and updated anytime incoming calls need to be handled differently – even if you can’t get into a physical location. You can present callers with automated self-route options. And to help inform the community of any emergency taking place, administrators can quickly log into their provider’s UCaaS web portal and record custom voice messages to relay important updates.
4) 911 – Save Valuable Time (example: elementary school emergency)
Now imagine that you’re a 2nd grade math teacher. You’re in the middle of a lesson when suddenly one of your students has a seizure. Per district protocol, you immediately dial 911. Unfortunately, the elementary school’s dial tone runs through the nearest high school PBX phone system, resulting in the high school address – not the elementary school address – showing up on the dispatcher’s screen. You need to spend precious time clarifying to dispatchers your location on campus. Additionally, you spend the next ten minutes calling internal leaders to notify them about the situation.
Cloud-based UCaaS systems save critical time in an emergency situation with 911 services. Automated group notifications can be sent to key personnel anytime 911 is dialed, allowing all stakeholders to know where and when an emergency situation is occurring for faster response. Additionally, pinpoint 911 allows 911 dispatchers to trace the exact location of a call down to the specific room, better directing emergency responders and saving critical time.
5) Communicate Better Across All Locations (example: company with huge growth)
Does this sound like you: A large equipment supplier built its phone system from the ground up, with their own coding. It worked at the time it was built and provided the flexibility for the IT staff to customize it any way they liked. But the system failed to keep up with recent growth, so new office locations installed their own systems, making it impossible for certain offices to even call each other. When the IT experts inevitably left the company, the system started to struggle and deteriorate.
A uniform UCaaS voice platform across all locations replaced this crippled communication system. The solution included a host of fun, intuitive features for employees and admins alike.
Once adopted across locations, employees were able to:
- Dial each other, company-wide, using only 4 digits
- Know at a glance who’s available at any time
- Use their mobile devices exactly as if they were on their office phones
- Call without worry of outages (these were virtually eliminated)
- Communicate without phones – using their new mobile and desktop softphone
- Program changes and customize the system from anywhere using an intuitive web-based admin interface.
An added bonus (since their phone supplier was also their network provider) was additional bandwidth and dedicated Tier 1 Internet access.
6) Enable Convenient Virtual Meeting Options (example: every working parent)
Your top salesperson is preparing to head to a customer meeting when her babysitter unexpectedly cancels. With UCaaS’s virtual meeting feature, she can call or text her customer, letting them know that a virtual meeting would be better for her schedule. Within minutes, she can join the customer in a virtual meeting room and have a face-to-face, interactive conversation without the need to reschedule.
Even as offices return onsite with in-person work, video conferencing is still a meaningful tool for flexible collaboration among employees, customers, partners, and the community at large. From conferences to board meetings, town halls to happy hours, lunch and learns to meet and greets, having a virtual meeting option available for those who can’t attend in person increases attendance and fosters a more inclusive environment for everyone.
These six examples are but a drop in the bucket of what’s possible with UCaaS.
If you’d like to explore more possibilities, you can start here.