Unified communications is something we talk a lot about at Wildix, mainly because that’s the key product we sell. But for many businesses, it’s often not clear why unified communications is the answer to many of their pain points. So let’s have a look at the seven reasons why unified communications is the answer to many of your business issues.
Alleviate Staffing Shortages
One of the hallmarks of unifying everything under the same umbrella is that it becomes more efficient — if you choose one provider, for example, for your support, you eliminate all the admin costs of multiple invoices and having to work out who is responsible for what. The same applies to software in general. If you can get everything in one place by unifying your tools, you make processes much more efficient.
This can heavily alleviate staffing shortages, as individual staff members can do much more. Some of our customers have found that even just adding a phonebook to the software (what we call LDAP, or Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) reduces admin time potentially by hours each day. The more you unify, the less searching, clicking and redirecting your office staff has to do.
Simplify Management
Related to this is making management much easier. By integrating analytics into your phone system, you can see who is doing what, how effective they are and a dozen other statistics that let you make more authoritative data-driven decisions that positively affect your business.
A German company, Nagarro, used our analytics platform to ensure that they were meeting service level agreements and check responses in real-time, even from the mobile app. This gave them a much more holistic view of how they were performing, and they could use real-time data to make changes on the fly and provide coaching.
This was possible due to the management tools available within the Wildix platform.
Reduce Costs
While it may seem counterintuitive that a subscription service such as unified communications will ultimately reduce costs, it can really be far cheaper to pay for a recurring subscription than a complete phone system upfront. The total cost of ownership is often difficult to estimate for hardware-based phone systems, mainly because they tend to require a lot more maintenance as they get older. Software as a service builds maintenance into the monthly subscription. However, the fact is that you pay a lot of money upfront for hardware phone system, must pay recurring costs when it comes to the lines you use and end up having to pay for continuous maintenance over the lifespan of the system.
In addition, you must pay for people to attend and install the system. That also is a cost, one that’s often not required for cloud-based systems such as Wildix. Then there are the tax implications. CapEx costs are usually calculated over 10 years (depending on your location), so you don’t get any tax benefit for part of the cost until a decade later — which is a potential opportunity cost for your business.
Ultimately, the expenses around a hardware system that is paid for upfront are much more complicated than a simple software-as-a-service system that’s treated as a recurring expense.
Improve Employee Experience
How well a new piece of software is utilized depends on how easy it is to use by employees. If your phone system is complex and difficult to use, they will use alternatives — often free ones that are much less traceable and trackable.
This means logging into the system must be seamless, but it must still be secure. A solution such as Wildix must use two-factor authentication (2FA) via Google or Office 365, and it must be intuitive. Adding on integrations to reduce process blocks can significantly reduce admin time and help show that there is a significant benefit to be gained by using the company-approved phone system — not their mobiles or a free app such as WhatsApp.
We find that when staff are fully trained on the system, which should only take 30 minutes, they find that a properly thought-out unified communications system is far more effective than the vast majority of hardware-based systems. By improving the employee experience, you improve retention, reduce turnover and promote loyalty.
Increase Communication Quality
While a simple phone line can be an extremely effective way to communicate, older hardware can be prone to dropouts, brownouts and jitter — all of which affect call quality. The same also applies to many older VoIP systems. However, modern unified communication systems have significantly improved over the past five years. This has been helped in part by the improvement of data quality, but it’s also been helped by significant improvements in noise suppression, jitter buffers and other technologies designed to improve call quality.
Even better, a good unified communications solution allows for failover, so if something goes wrong with a datacenter, you can still dial out and receive calls. That’s because the load is transferred to another datacenter.
However, if your hardware PBX server goes down in the office, you may be out of luck, unless that has an integrated SIM to provide additional failover (which Wildix also offers).
Recruit From a Wider Market
One of the big benefits of unified communications is that it allows remote work. At Wildix, we are a remote-first company, and so we have good processes set up to encourage this practice. This includes a great unified communications system that allows us to do what we need to do — we have integrations for our CRM (Salesforce) and a whole load of other systems.
As a result, our staff can access tools wherever they are — at home, in the office or on the road. This means that office staff, such as marketing, can work from anywhere around the world. We have staff in most European countries and distributed heavily around the United States. This allows us to recruit the talent we need from a much wider pool, rather than being limited to one specific city in each country — and we avoid relocation issues, as well.
That’s one of the big benefits of unified communications: We are not limited to any geographic area, allowing us to utilize talent wherever they are.
Ultimately, these can address different pain points for a huge range of organizations, from manufacturing and retail to legal, financial and healthcare. While not every point will apply to your business, if even one or two resonate with you, it’s time to consider changing your phone system to a cloud-based unified communications system. Continue your journey into the world of unified communications here.
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