For a long time, businesses relied on landlines to ensure the efficiency of their business communication. Soon, email, texting and instant messaging arrived, and advanced written communication became an intrinsic part of how businesses connected.
Still, it would be ideal if technology were able to integrate all these different platforms—from voice to messaging to video—to create a singular, streamlined platform employees could rely on.
This is where Unified Communications (UC) comes in.
What is UC?
UC, in basic terms, is a platform that combines all your different productivity and communication platforms into a single system.
By integrating these different technologies into a single system, businesses can leverage Hosted VoIP to allow these functionalities to run via the internet, ensuring more cost efficiency and consistency in business communication.
What can you integrate with UC?
A lot of companies assume that only communication tools can be integrated with a UC platform. However, just about everything can be joined within a UC platform.
Most businesses start with real-time communication features like voice calls, call screening, call conferencing and instant messaging. From here, they add multimedia features like video chat and web conferencing. More tech-savvy companies add features like e-commerce, online banking and even team scheduling to UC platforms.
Be sure to check with your provider to see how you can make the most out of your UC platform.
What are the known benefits of UC to businesses?
UC’s ability to streamline different communication and productivity features into a single, flexible infrastructure is, perhaps, its most well-known perk. This allows companies to enhance their business communication and manage the different aspects of running a business.
However, there’s a lot more to UC than just organizing everything for easy use. Here are some examples:
- Hypermobility. UC supports one of the growing trends in business today—mobility. UC allows companies to use smart, mobile devices to access important data and ensure consistent communication with team members, regardless of where they work.
- Productivity. UC is equipped with a lot of productivity-enhancing communication tools—call info, call routine and video conferencing, to name a few. This allows employees to work productively and attend to client or customer needs efficiently.
- Collaboration. Features like web and video conferencing allow for real-time interaction. They also support collaboration, especially among remote teams. With features like these, delayed response times and gaps in communication can be minimized and even avoided. They also provide the ability to gain insight and information in real time, at the speed of need.
- Centralization. Clearly defined points of contact and communication ensure that everyone on the team is able to reach whomever they need—whether by email, text, IM or voice—using only one centralized platform.
- Cost efficiency. UC, because it uses Hosted VoIP, can help minimize communication costs. When used strategically, it can also eliminate the cost of travel required to move to and from meetings.
UC is poised to become the norm when it comes to day-to-day office communication, and there’s no better time than now to take the next step. GoToConnect is an all-new platform that combines the power and reliability of Jive’s Hosted VoIP phone systems with GoToMeeting’s web, audio and video conferencing into one simple, reliable and flexible solution. If you’re interested in learning more about what GoToConnect and UC can do for your company, give us a call today.