One of the most important aspects of conducting business is the ability to communicate easily, quickly and efficiently across the company and between partners. Promoting effective communication is critical to business operations, and the technology your employees use to conduct these communications – via messaging, email and voice – can make a real difference in the long run.
How do companies ensure in-house and external communication is as effective as it can be? Technology solutions can be utilized to fill the gaps where human interaction lacks. Email, phone and instant messaging are all key tools that companies can use to promote efficient, effective communication between teams and employees in general.
Therefore, investing in a unified communications strategy can be one of the most important decisions a CIO can make for his or her organization. Both on-premises and hosted UC tools offer a slew of advantages. For instance, implementing cloud-based UC solutions is a step in the right direction. In a 2015 survey of 451 IT executives, Harvard Business Review Analytic Services found that 72 percent of respondents view collaboration as a top advantage of cloud computing. This is a clear indication that the benefits of UC are enhanced by the fact that these tools exist in the cloud.
“Both on-premises and hosted UC tools offer a slew of advantages.”
Top benefits
There are several key advantages to utilizing a hosted UC solution. Here are only a few:
- Mobility: In today’s business landscape, everything is going mobile. Bring-your-own-device policies have become a key aspect of the technology strategy of many organizations. In addition, the fact that these tools are powered by the cloud makes it easier to take them with you wherever you go. Need to answer an email on the run? Or conduct a conference call from the airport? No problems with hosted UC solutions.
- Productivity: Because cloud-based UC allows for this enhanced mobility, workers can boost their productivity to new levels. Being able to collaborate during the commute and from home has been known to increase the amount of work employees can accomplish. A 2015 study conducted by Stanford researcher Nicholas Bloom found that call center employees who worked exclusively from home made 13.5 percent more phone calls than their office-bound counterparts, according to the Harvard Business Review.
- Cost-effectiveness: Hosted solutions are cost-effective due to their cloud-based nature. Cloud computing itself has been proven to save organizations in both capital and operational expenses, and hosted UC is no different. Instead of having to invest in phone lines that won’t travel with your business if you have to move to a different office, outsourcing UC means you don’t have to pay extra to switch landlines.
The coming year
As 2016 gets underway, industry analysts are hopeful about the future of UC. According to Information Age contributor Ben Rossi, organizations have the opportunity to gain better return on investment for their UC tools in the coming year. Once the challenges of security and utilization are surmounted, along with maintaining value and determining whether on-premises or hosted solutions are the best for a particular organization’s strategy, companies that adopt these kinds of tools will start to see real ROI.
Collaborate with ISG Technology today to gain the benefits from implementing cloud-based unified communications tools. We offer on-premises UC solutions, along with cloud-based tools made possible with our data center services.