Unified Communications – How it can improve your staff’s productivity

Unified Communications provides businesses with a great leap forward in technology. Your staff are getting along fine with their current systems, though, so why would you want to shake that up? Well, you may not have considered some of the benefits a UC platform can bring to your business. It can truly revolutionise your staff’s productivity in a number of ways – this article will explore just a few of them.

Centralising Communications saves time

Everything you can do as a business manager to save your staff time is going to have a positive effect on their productivity. UC’s centralised architecture lets your staff use one login for all their communication tools.

Historically your communication and collaboration tools have all been discrete services, requiring your staff to sign into each of them separately. Not only does this mean your staff have to spend the better part of half an hour each morning getting themselves ready to work, but it also usually means a lot of your expensive tools go un-used because staff simply don’t log on to them.

This centralised philosophy promotes staff collaboration – if the best tool for the job is right at their fingertips without having to open and login to another app, your staff are far more likely to use it. Why email screenshots to a colleague for input when you can share your screen and get feedback much quicker, for example?

Bring your remote workers closer to the office with mobility tools

Remote workers – whether they are external salespeople meeting customers or outside consultants working from home – have traditionally not had the best productivity tools available to them. Unified Communications changes this. With apps available on all platforms including mobiles, there’s no question of cross-compatibility issues, and no expensive hardware to install. UC truly enables a “BYOD” culture in your business. This means that all your staff based outside your office finally have access to the same tools your in-house staff use to collaborate and communicate effectively. At last, your remote workers will no longer be “that guy in Scotland” – they’ll be Jim, extension 415, expert in business consultancy.

Scalable solutions

Growth is almost certainly one of your main goals as a business. Growing quickly is terrific – it’s a sign that things must be going well – but it does create its fair share of problems. Some tools simply aren’t suitable for larger businesses, so may need to be changed out for more scalable alternatives as your company grows. This has obvious impacts on your staff’s productivity as they have to get used to a changing culture and suite of tools.

The enterprise-grade features of our UC platform are all available from day one, and work just as well for small businesses as they do for larger corporate offices. Extensions can be easily grouped by department or team – questions that used to go to your one-person accounts department can now be asked directly to the whole department in a group chat, for example. This means that your staff only ever have to learn how to use one set of tools, saving them a lot of time to focus on developing the business further.

Improving collaboration between your staff and customers

UC’s features help your staff get answers to your customers much quicker. Less time spent on the phone with customers will always mean your staff have more time available to dedicate to their core responsibilities. Apart from the obvious improvements in customer satisfaction that will result from being able to help them faster, your staff will have to spend less time hunting for the right team or person in your company to answer a customer query.

We can also help integrate your CRM with the UC platform. This unlocks features like screen popping, where a caller’s details will be pulled form your CRM database and automatically displayed to your staff when they receive a call. With the relevant data displayed so quickly, your staff will be able to diagnose and resolve any issues the customer may have in real time. This will cut down on the number of tickets or issues your staff need to raise and will reduce customer frustration by cutting hold and wait times.

These aren’t the only real-world benefits that UC can bring to your business, but they hopefully have given you a good idea of the sort of improvements you can see by Unifying your Communications. We haven’t even touched on the powerful statistics and reporting features, which managers can use to analyse and quantify your staff’s productivity. This makes identifying areas for future improvements much easier.

We’d love to hear from you to see what we can do to improve the performance and efficiency of your business. Get in touch with us today for a free quote.