November 27, 2024
Unified communications (UC) is great. It really is. It makes life easier for everyone pretty much all day long, and that translates into increased productivity organization-wide. It also makes life easier for IT teams that are used to managing and maintaining an on-premises phone system.
But don’t kid yourself. Where you find incredibly feature-rich platforms that can integrate with a multitude of other feature-rich platforms, you get some serious complexity. Proper implementation requires some specialized knowledge, and onboarding can take 60-90 days. So while it’s “easier,” installing, managing, and maintaining your UC system isn’t for everyone. That’s why there’s UCaaS — short for unified communications as a service. So in this blog, let’s go over the benefits of UC vs. UCaaS, and which version is best for you.
What Are the Benefits of Unified Communications?
If you’ve ever tried to retrace an important conversation and combed through your inbox and various apps only to come up empty-handed, you already understand why unified communications can help your staff work more efficiently and effectively. But that’s not all.
1. Productivity Enhancement
Like the name suggests, unified communications unite all communications under one platform. Having everything in one place makes almost everything faster and easier.
How much faster and easier? Turns out, at an organization with 100 employees with an average salary of $50,000, UC can save around $464,000 in productivity.
2. Less Frustration
Many modern communication tools are great at doing one or two things well, but too many of them can create a frustrating work environment and lead to burnout. One tool that can provide an excellent user experience for every form of communication can easily address this common pain point.
3. Better Mobile Workforce Solutions
No matter where your staff works, they’ll all have access to the same set of professional, secure communication tools.
Even if you’re largely back in the office, it means that work can keep moving if a parent needs to stay home with a sick child or a key collaborator is attending an important conference.
4. More Information Integration
If you added up all of the knowledge spread across your entire organization, can you imagine what you’d have at your fingertips? Unfortunately, most communication tools that only do one or two things well have a fundamental design flaw — they tend to create information silos that aren’t shared between staff members, let alone across departments. UC breaks those silos down.
5. Get Real-Time Analytics
When should you have more staff to cover phones? What tools are being used most and when? It’s much easier to keep your finger on the pulse of your organization and make well-informed decisions with UC, no matter where your staff is working or where you are.
6. Improved Cybersecurity
Having robust cybersecurity features is a significant part of their value proposition, so the developers of various UC platforms have invested a good deal of time and money there. In fact, moving to cloud communication tools is often a cybersecurity upgrade from an on-premises solution. But nothing is without risk.
End users are ultimately responsible for configuring their tools and using them properly. I’ll elaborate more on this a bit later!
7. Improved Collaboration Tools
UC isn’t just a good substitute for in-person work. In some ways, it’s actually proven itself to be better and more inclusive than in-person collaboration.
It has more features to accommodate vision or hearing impairments and language difficulties. It also makes it much easier for quieter people to indicate that they have something to say. Bottom line, UC tools make it easier for everyone to contribute ideas equally.
Bonus territory — teams that collaborate better are more innovative.
8. Faster Customer Service
Here’s a hypothetical: What happens if a customer calls your business every time, and they have a consistent experience, get quick, knowledgeable answers to their questions, and don’t have to repeat the same information to every person who answers the phone?
The answer is that your business builds a significant amount of trust. Unified communications is just a tool, but it can lead to a better customer experience — a powerful differentiator that can lead to significant growth.
What Do You Get With UCaaS That You Don’t With UC?
Those letters, aaS, stand for “as a service.” And every time you see them in an oddly capitalized tech acronym (CCaaS, SaaS, and CPaaS), that’s what they mean. Yes, they’re funny. But besides that, you get a lot more when you add them.
Future-Proof Your Communications
With UCaaS, your provider will handle all software updates and patching, so your solution is always up to date.
Get Responsive Unified Communications Support and Maintenance
We can’t speak for every provider, but all of Marco's UCaaS customers receive support from 7:00 a.m. – 7:00 p.m. CST for end-user issues, changes, help desk requests, questions, and programming. Really, any support users need during standard business hours is covered. Beyond this, we also provide 24/7 monitoring of the data center, infrastructure, platform, and network connectivity.
Have an Expert Secure Your Communications
As with many cloud computing solutions, any developer worth their salt will have invested in robust cybersecurity tools. But it’s the user’s job to apply them correctly.
Configuring your settings correctly for your organization and how you work requires special skills. But when you get UCaaS as opposed to UC, you’re also getting those skills that many internal teams don’t have.
Get More ROI Faster
New communication systems require some getting used to, which is why we allow plenty of time for end-user training when we implement UCaaS. It can make a world of difference when it comes to adoption and getting the ROI you’re paying for.
We do this all the time, so we understand where taking some extra time goes a long way. And since training is included, your IT team won’t be responsible for it. And that brings me to my final point.
Free Up Your IT Team
Even if your IT team is currently managing your phone system, it might not be the best use of their time. Plus, as the IT talent shortage is expected to affect more organizations for the foreseeable future, a UCaaS is a great way to reduce the workload.
Our Managed Communication Services Solution
We offer two UC options: Microsoft Teams and Webex by Cisco. We’ve recently updated our UCaaS solution to offer a few more hard-to-find perks for our clients, like getting special pricing and Cisco Certified service technicians. Click the link below to learn more about what makes Marco’s UnifiedCollaboration tough to beat!
