October 10, 2024
Some organizations are comfortable with their operations, happy with the status quo, and satisfied with their level of productivity and profit. But if that doesn’t sound like your business, you're not alone. Your company might even land on the other end of the spectrum, constantly looking for new ways to work, increase productivity, and innovate.
If this is the case, your organization would likely benefit from unified communications (UC), which can revolutionize your business practices and set your organization up for levels of productivity you haven’t yet imagined. So here's the big question: How do you know if UC is right for your organization? Ask yourself the following 7 questions.
1. How Complex Are Your Business Communication Needs?
Unified communications is an investment, and that investment can often pay for itself if it’s replacing communication tools you’re purchasing separately. It can also turbocharge productivity organization-wide. However, if there’s a mismatch between your system and your capabilities and needs, it could affect adoption rates, and therefore, impact your ROI.
If your company is currently meeting or exceeding its customer service needs, you only use a few communication tools, and staff isn’t routinely frustrated by losing track of what information was shared where, you might be able to get by with another hosted voice solution.
2. Is Your Company Becoming More Mobile?
Unified communications is particularly good at helping employees feel like they are “in” the office even when they are on the road or working remotely. By centralizing the streams of messaging, coworkers get the same experience every time, and it feels like they are at their desks even when they are at home, in a coffee shop, or at the airport. Unified communications means unifying any device, anywhere, anytime.
3. Are You Looking To Improve Collaboration and Innovation?
Unified communications solves a number of collaboration challenges while making it easier for all ideas to be heard. Here’s how:
- It reduces the effects of hierarchies in meetings
- It offers advanced tools to make meetings more productive
- It makes it easier to collaborate on the same document from anywhere in real-time
- Its advanced features make it easier to ask a colleague a quick question, so projects keep moving
- It makes it easy for approvals and edits to happen when a colleague is working from home or on the go
4. Do You Need To Improve Your Customer Experience?
Every business has bad days. But one common growing pain that companies experience is being unable to provide the same personalized, responsive service as they scale up. If you’ve had to solve an issue with a larger company, you’ve probably experienced just how frustrating this can be.
But it doesn’t have to be that way! Your unified communications system can integrate with other advanced CRM platforms and tools to make sure that you can provide accurate information and resolve issues quickly. Some of these integrations will require advanced IT skills, but you can also purchase unified communications as a service (UCaaS) from a provider, which means you get all of the power without all of the responsibility. So your new smart, automated systems can get your customers to a real human being when they need complex problem-solving, and automated answers when they don’t.
5. Are You Prepared for Future Technological Advancements?
The only UC platforms we’d recommend investing in are also those that are known for continuous innovation and fine-tuning their integrations with other tools. Good news — that means that these tools will help you get access to the latest and greatest features and tools the instant they become available!
But if your employees are especially resistant to change, while these tools tend to be exceptionally user-friendly, they won’t be exactly the same or behave the same way in five years. They’re a good match for businesses that want to keep up with technology through a series of frequent but smaller changes. They might not be a good fit for businesses that like to be in control of what changes and when.
6. Are You Ready for Widespread Cloud Adoption?
If you’re already using a variety of cloud computing and communication solutions, UC will probably be a lateral move for you. But if you’re moving from an on-premises phone system to UC, and you’re also considering a few other cloud computing solutions, you also might need to upgrade your network in order to handle that kind of traffic.
7. Have You Considered the Long-Term Cost Implications?
Because UC solutions are delivered in the cloud, businesses can finally get out of having to completely overhaul their phone systems every 5–8 years.
That helps transform a business liability and a significant budget hit into a regular, reliable business expense. But unless this solution also happens to boost productivity or help you solve other problems, there are cheaper ways to do that!
UC vs. UCaaS
Isn’t UC already a service? Ok, fair point. Let’s explore the differences between these two.
What You Should Know About Just Purchasing the Platform
If you already have sufficient IT skills in-house, and you’d like to just purchase a subscription to a UC platform (e.g. Teams, Zoom, Webex), you might still want to purchase through a provider instead of the developer. Providers can often make subscription management easier and will often offer much better technical support.
However, if you go that route, your internal team will be responsible for the ongoing management, maintenance, integrations, and configuration these systems require. These platforms tend to make these duties much easier than that of traditional phone systems, but your IT team’s time may be better spent elsewhere.
What You Should Know About Purchasing UCaaS Instead
When a provider does the heavy lifting, it makes it possible for relatively small companies get to take advantage of these enterprise-scale tools. You will pay the provider more for their services, but a provider will make sure implementation goes smoothly, offer far better end-user training, and help you unlock far more ROI.
Getting the Best Deal on UCaaS, UC, or Other Cloud Communication Tools
I touched on this earlier, but while many might assume that they’ll get a better deal if they purchase from a software developer rather than a technology provider, that’s often not the case!
Not all communication providers are the same, but at Marco, we’ve taken the time to partner with top software developers to make sure that we can always offer our clients rare pricing and best-in-class support. We’ve also recently upgraded our UCaaS offering to make it easy for our clients to upgrade their meeting spaces for less. You’re always welcome to talk to a human about which communication tool would make the most sense for your business. But if you’re still in the research phase, you might find one of our recent videos helpful. Click the link below to watch!
