How Your Business can Reap the Benefit of Unified Communication

Unified communications (UC) covers up several communication systems  including unified messaging, collaboration, and interaction systems,  real-time communications; and transactional applications. Unified communication solutions use new technologies to integrate and streamline messages from many sources.

Components of UC:

UC  is not a technology, but, it is a solution. The solution includes:

• Call control, and/or switch integration;
• Conferencing: audio, web, video;
• Messaging:  instant messaging, email, voice mail, unified messaging, short message
  service (SMS);
• Client:  may be on the desktop, mobile device, soft phone, or Web portal.
• Collaboration:  shared workspaces, white boarding, document sharing;

How it affects the end user and business:

The overall  business benefits of Universal Computing are increased mobility, better collaboration, less travel time and costs, or improved customer service and it can be achieved by integrating UC to the core processes.  With the help of UC tools like collaboration technologies that shares knowledge and documents, enterprises witnessed shorter project times, quicker time-to-market.  Any kind of enterprise, be it large or SMB,  wants to enhance customer relationships and intimacy, enable anytime/anywhere communications, increase worker productivity - whether in the office or road. Employees and customers are going to have the same communication facilities available regardless of location or device.

Workers , by using the UC, can improve the productivity like:

1. Personal Call or Contact Management provides desktop call screening of inbound calls, on-screen directory dialing, and PC or graphic user interface (GUI) control of phone features.
2. Mobile Access provides UC functionalities to mobile devices that allows workers out of the office in having the same communication tools, regardless of location.
3. Workgroup of team collaboration provides the functionalities to the team members to work interactively in real time, that results in shorter project times, quicker time-to-market,
   and greater company efficiency.
4. By using the Mobile Personnel feature of UC, the contact initiators can locate and connect individuals within the company regardless of their location.

Improvement of Business Process:

Organizations witness the greatest benefit when UC is integrated with core business processes. All kinds of business face some kind of deadlock in terms of productivity or delay in workflow process. That may impact the enterprise like unhappy customers, extra cost and expenses etc. Everybody needs to communicate in an enteprise with co-workers, suppliers, partners, customers. If there is a delay in response , the business process is affected. By integrating UC  with core processes, these business processes move smoothly without any delay.

ROI:

Basic UC impacts personal productivity. But the benefit of collaborative UC is extended to the whole workgroup. Thus it offers increased ROI. If an enterprise adopts core business process integration with UC, the benefit increases beyond an individual or enterprise. So the benefit is even greater.

Conclusion:

There is no direct path to implement UC successfully. Enterprises implements UC products as per their needs, goals, existing infrastructure, business processes. By integrating the UC tools with business processes and applications, workers can be made more effective, efficient, and productive, by changing existing workflow.