Life has become faster and faster in the digital age. People keep supercomputers in their pockets, and soon with the impending release of the Apple Watch, on their wrists. People make phone calls on their computers and control our thermostats and lights with our phones. In many cases your customers are already using their own form of unified communications and they expect you to keep pace.
That’s why your business must work to embrace a Unified Communications, or UC, solution now more than ever. Think about all of the moving parts and pieces in your business – the constant stream of emails, texts, files, voice mails and meeting reminders. Just keeping tabs on these moving bits is hard enough, unless you can find a way to organize or unify them into one tidy and manageable stack of data.
And that’s what Unified Communications is. The integration of all of your business communications needs under one, cohesive system. This includes instant messaging systems, email, telephone, audio and video conferencing and cloud sharing.
These services must all work seamlessly in order to reduce friction and create a better customer experience.
Promote Collaboration
With UC, you can bring your team together whether they work in different departments, different buildings or different continents.
A Unified Communications solution provides you with live chat in your office, as well as presence awareness, so you know who on your team is available and can ask them questions faster than email. Do you want to brainstorm with your whole marketing team? You can start a group chat and select all of the members to be included. In addition, live video and audio conferencing systems can bring your team together without travel, saving time and money on hotels and gas mileage.
With cloud-based data sharing services, multiple members of your team can work together on the same projects without miscommunications. When there are no breaks in communication between your employees, and more options to get work done, you’ll soon see productivity and employee happiness rise.
Simplify Your Business Operations
With all of your communications data in one place, you’ll waste less time finding the information you need. You’ll be able to log call data and email data together to create more complete customer profiles, and keep better track of all forms of follow up from all of your employees.
Are you tired of sifting through files of stored faxes and scanning them by hand to make digital copies? A unified communications solution can automatically save all faxes as PDFs for easy digital storage.
UC also provides you peace of mind when you are out of the office, your employees will always be able to reach you on your mobile devices or laptop. Don’t want to be bothered? Your messages from all sources can be stored for when you return. Gone are the days of rushing to your hotel business center to check in with your staff back at work.
Wow Your Customers
Customer service with a unified communications solution is as exciting as it is innovative. You can track every single interaction you have with your customers and every interaction they have with you. If they make a public complaint on social media, your support staff can reach out to them to try and solve the problem by phone. All of this is trackable and stored, so your company can make more informed decisions about how to care for customers.
Nothing is more frustrating to a customer than to call multiple times about the same problem. They call and call, and get routed to different representatives but never get anywhere. The reps aren’t aware of each interaction, what the other reps have suggested that didn’t work, and they end up frustrating the customer more. With unified communications, these interactions are tracked and stored, customers can even be routed to the same representatives if desired. The options are limitless and constantly evolving with new advancements in communications software.
Unified communications is the future of business communication and interaction. You owe it to yourself, your employees, your customers, and more importantly your bottom line to consider a unified communications solution.
Talk to a professional at Allied and find out how you can unify your communications today
