messagelink of the week
Davide Petramala
VP Sales, Marketing
Esna Technologies Inc.
Unified Communications Drives Savings—Both Time and Money
The idea behind Unified Communications is straightforward: Invest in the technology in order to save time and money! Technology should be leveraging your voice infrastructure and integrated into your core business process to exponentially drive employee productivity, while reducing the costs associated with inefficient business operations.
For a small business, unifying your methods of communication keeps you ahead of the game. By actually using the applications to communicate, you are saving considerable costs on standard search and call for multiple numbers, and you're not wasting time leaving several messages trying to make one connection. By streamlining your communication system and services, you can increase productivity and customer satisfaction when you roll-out unified communications across multiple locations. Save money—by gaining easy access to presence and availability of colleagues. Save time—by reducing the amount of interactions required to make a live connection in order to communicate with them. Colleagues in Europe can see fellow employees login from New York, instantly users will know if they're available for a quick instant message (IM). They can move from instant messaging to conference calling right from their Google Apps environment. With conference calling, not only are they able to connect and talk, but they can collaborate at the same time on whatever project is in the works.
Remember that by combining your communication services you can save money, because it's low in cost and there is no risk. You'll be mobile and open to communicate using any device. Integration is simple; you can call, SMS, and IM directly from your existing business application, or straight from your Smartphone. You can also share a centralized phonebook which makes controlling your entire UC system very easy.
In short, the advantage of deploying UC from a corporate and management perspective includes: central contact directories, call metrics (such as logging and tracking time on calls with clients in a database), multimedia work, and multi-site integration with reduced setup problems than previously noted. All of these additional features save time and money relating to employee productivity and core business processes which essentially reduce overall management costs.
