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| Unified Communications have been growing steeply in popularity in the past years. The pressuring questions service providers ask themselves have shifted from “What is UC?” to “How can I profit from UC?” and the latter has yet to be answered for a lot of people. There are |
| many ways to |
| turn a profit by offering Unified Communications and this paper will |
| tell you how. |
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The UC market
As the market-share of existing providers shrinks and down, the competition for subscribers increases. Developing new services to retain existing customers and attract new ones is essential for maintaining a place in this dynamic market. By offering real-time communication and collaboration, you can enhance customer loyalty, reduce churn, and churn and potentially increase their ARPU (Average Revenue Per User).
Enterprise hosting requires that service providers shape offerings to meet more complex business needs. Increasing revenues often requires developing new service offerings and entering new markets, both of which bring additional challenges. A new extensible platform that enables integrated and differentiated services can help you expand your service offerings and grow into new services and markets, offering advanced messaging and collaboration services to consumers as well as entering the enterprise hosting market.
Unified Communications helps you create powerful connections between people, both inside and outside your organization, for greater productivity.
Definition
What is UC?
Unified Communications Putting it in as few words as possible, it is a concept that integrates real-time and non-real-time communication services.
The neighboring list is not complete. The The complexity of the term comes from its tendency to continuously change. As new communication flows emerge, UC has to integrate them, and thus, gains an extended definition. . In fewer words, it literally puts all the communication and collaboration channels available at any given time under one umbrella.
In its broadest sense, Unified Communications covers all forms of communication exchanged through the internet. This includes IPTV and digital signage, for instance.One One sure fact is that Unified Communications doesn't come as a product, but as a set of products put together in a consistent interface. This makes it desirable to users attractive because of the easy access and the easy maintenance that this single interface provides.
Benefits
Adding new services to your portfolio is bound to draw more clients towards your business; especially since we are not talking about the same old features that everyone already knows. This UC component has been ignored by most service providers, not knowing that their users could crave it.
The benefits of UC are vast and depend on how you choose to leverage the tool. Each means of communication comes with its own set of advantages and UC brings them all together creating an all-in-one solution. It generally boosts productivity and efficiency, ultimately leading to more income.
Mobility
Out of all the benefits that UC brings, the one that stands out is mobility. When travelling or whenever you are out of the office, all you need for a VoIP call and an online presence is a laptop computer with a broadband internet connection and an a softphone installed softphone on the said laptopit. The softphone will only need just needs to be configured with the public IP address of the server running the IP PBX software as well as your authentication data. Imagine the increase in productivity that this capability brings.
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71% of small to medium businesses adopt wireless technology
56% is the percentage of time that an average mobile professionals works outside of the office
"As
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our study
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indicates that more SMB mobile professionals are connected via their smartphones and tablets, this enables them to work outside of the office more seamlessly, and encourages mobile professionals to nurture a connection with their local communities. In fact, 74 percent of SMB owners believe that it's crucial to be actively involved
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" said Godfrey Phillips, vice president for research
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Your mobile phone is just essentially an extension of Unified Communications. We aren’t trying to deny its importance, but just to underline that it is merely a component and that your mobility can be dramatically enhanced.
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UC. Picture this: you’re travelling overseas on business. You have your cell phone but the fee is somewhere around $2.00 a minute. You don’t need a laptop, or a smartphone. Any device that connects to the internet will suffice. You can install a softphone on your iPod
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touch for instance and make VoIP calls from any Wi-Fi hot spot.
Time
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efficiency
With UC, efficiency is increased with the interconnectivity of communication channels. This means you can send your information on one channel and receive the reply on another. This can prove to be a high increase spell a huge boost in productivity. Say you call a phone line; , the receiver recipient is not in the office, so you leave a voicemail. The receiver recipient has set his/her voicemail to go in his the email inbox. He has a smartphone and immediately sees your message and replies/she can now immediately see your message on their personal smartphone and instantly reply.
A major contributor to time efficiency is presence information. In telecommunication networking, presence fills in the gaps between the sender and the recipient within the communication portfolio. With presence, you do not don't need to initiate a communication flow before knowing if the recipient is available or not. Thus, the amount of time amount and effort are automatically reduced.
Using all online communication means from a single interface is a huge advantage, but the intelligence brilliance of the system lies in knowing which connections can be established before attempting to initiate them. Presence information implies greater efficiency in such a simple way.
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A financial services institution with more than 1.8 million members has a staff of 2,500 employees located in 149 different branches. The 120-person contact center handles approximately 280,000 inbound telephone calls per year. |
Setting it up
Social media integration
With an estimated 15 minutes spent on YouTube and more than an hour on Facebook every day, your employees are not exactly maximizing the time they have on their hands. But by integrating social media into Unified Communications, not only can you even out the numbers, but you can profit from it too. Users can handle social sites from the same place they manipulate online communication channels. Consistency and rapid access to online information is crucial for any business.
Cost-effectiveness
Bluntly put, this is how UC saves you tons of cash:
- Travelling costs – no more foreign calling cards, no more long distance calling fees
- Telephone bills – your bill will be considerably lower with internet telephony
- Hardware resources – you already own most of the required hardware
- Human resources – your current staff can administrate the network; if your data is in the cloud, you don’t need to worry about anything
- Work efficiency – your staff communicates better and therefore works better
- One purchase - you only need one client application for all means of communication
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A hospital trust has nothing but advantages with automation |
Setup
In order to gain new clients and increase ARPU, all you need to do is evaluate your current infrastructure and alternatives to see ways how to improve services and reduce costs. Most service or hosting providers already have a reliable infrastructure that can be used for offering Unified Communications with no extra hardware purchases.
Your company probably already has most of the necessary hardware infrastructure – servers and an Internet connection. In addition to these, all you need is You can also use a physical gateway that connects the PSTN to your network in order to make VoIP calls, but it's not mandatory.
Regarding software, in addition to an IP PBX - which acts very similar similarly to a physical PBX but has enhanced features , - you will need softphones on each computer in the network in order to be able to make and receive calls. These are available for online purchase and a few are actually freefree of charge or paid, depending on the set of features they offer. For a more familiar experience, you can buy IP phones or VoIP adapters for regular phones.
Once you have all thesethis, you’ll be able all set, ready to make calls within your network. To get in touch with the outside world, you will need 'll require one or more SIP channelstrunks. SIP stands for Session Instantiation Protocol and is the most common protocol for VoIP on the internet today. SIP trunking providers operate an infrastructure that can route and connect the calls originating from your system to phone numbers on other infrastructures (IP networks or PSTN). Your local telephone company provides one or more trunk lines to the customer for connection to the customer's PBX and allocates a range of telephone numbers to this line (or group of lines) and forwards all calls to such numbers via the trunkproviders can connect incoming calls too, not just outgoing. You can use an IP PBX without any connection to the local telephone company, SIP providers can allocate DIDs as well.
Management
Managing your Unified Communications network is easier than expected. A single instance of VoipNow runs on a server and serves multiple client organizations or tenants. A service provider can still deploy multiple VoipNow Professional virtual environments on the same physical machine, even if the software is multi-tenant.
The user-friendly interface is highly intuitive and 4PSA offers tutorials and support for any problems encountered. No extra staff members need to be hired is required since the system can easily be administrated by your current network administrators.
Unified Communications software is scalable. This means that even if you increase or decrease your hardware resources, the software is able to expand and contract its resource pool to adapt. Moreover, scalability also means that as your company grows and the network grows, the system won’t lose its functionality and efficiency.
UC can help you manage internal matters, also. Take the text-to-speech system for example (often referred to as TTS). Your customers may want to receive personalized feedback or to interrogate your database by phone. Recordings and human responses within a call center are both slow and costly. TTS introduces a new level of automation in Unified Communications and it reduces costs per call.
Human efforts are also considerably lowered with VoipNow since billing is also automated. With a regular IP PBX you most likely would You don't have to export call records and then process them either manually or with another software product. This is not time effective and the reports may not be precise. VoipNow’s charging plans automate this operation for you and its call history based reporting is always exact accurate.
Reduce costs
In today’s market environment, customers often chase the lowest price using their service provider only as a means of access. Once online, they subscribe elsewhere for free e-mail and other web tools.
Price continues to be the top reason to switch providers, but it is not the only one. Attracting and retaining customers requires developing services that promote loyalty. Creating services that customers cannot get elsewhere — and on which they depend — is the best way to develop devoted subscribers.
Many service providers point to spam and viruses as the single biggest factor associated with increasing costs. It’s a lot of effort just to assure you deliver only safe e-mails. But spam and viruses are not the only issues affecting costs. Poor scalability and performance, increasing licensing fees, and the high cost of maintaining infrastructure and supporting customers also contribute to rising costs.
How you will save money:
- Travelling costs – no more foreign calling cards, no more long distance calling fees
- Telephone bills – your bill will be considerably lower with internet telephony
- Hardware resources – you already own most of the required hardware
- Human resources – your current staff can administrate the network; if your data is in the cloud, you don’t need to worry about anything
- Work efficiency – your staff communicates better and, thus, works better
- One purchase - you only need one client application for all communication means
Social Networking
Websites like Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter have the purpose to connect people from all over the globe faster and easier. Social sites have no geographical boundaries to keep people with the same interests communicate and keep in touch.
Social media fundamentally changed the way we interact and communicate, democratizing the world's information. Through social networking, small companies have a fighting chance against industry mastodons. It revolutionized the way we do business. With it you can not only spread information and advertise, but share perspective with the world, as well.
Social Networking has become part of our day to day life. Facebook has higher traffic than Google, so it is safe to say that people use the web socially more than they do in order to get information.
The majority of consumers (78%) trust peer recommendations over advertisements and traditional publicity means when considering a purchase. In a study, 97.03% of respondents have declared that an online experience has influenced their decision of purchasing a product or a service from a certain brand. Social media has become a must for any business, as an online presence can be more valuable than any other marketing campaign. Considering the traffic it has nowadays, imagine how bad customer experiences can influence prospect buyers.
If you choose to promote your business or simply stay in touch with your friends via social websites, what websites will you choose? Twitter – to keep people in the know, Flickr – to give visual insight of your activities, Foursquare – to let everyone know where you are or LinkedIn – to be up-to-date with business evolution? You will probably want Facebook, but Google+ is an interesting and promising prospect, too. Each of these websites has its own benefits so you will probably try to use each and every one of them. Log in, post some photos, tweet about them and don't forget to respond to everyone that tried to contact you. This sums up in an overwhelming number of open tabs and a lot of wasted time and effort.
With an average of 15 minutes spent on YouTube daily and a dazzling 55 minutes spent on Facebook, you can only imagine that this would probably affect your employees’ effective working time as well as your own. By integrating social media into Unified Communications, not only can you even the numbers, but you can make a profit out of it.
We believe that all communication flows should be included in Unified Communications. UC, as it is seen today, is not completely unified. It lacks this important component. Consider the advantages that would come from merging social networking into UC.
With this integration, users have the facility to manipulate all social websites from one place, the same place from which they manipulate all their other means of online communication. This way, they get consistency and ease of access to their online information. People often realize that they “have a problem” while acknowledging how much time they spend keeping their social networks updated. What few of them realize is that much of that time is spent switching from website to website, from an interface to another or from various web apps.
Adding new services to your portfolio is bound to draw more clients towards your business; especially since we are not talking about the same old features that everyone already knows. This UC component has been ignored by most service providers and users could love it.
The benefits you can gain from using Unified Communications services are various and all depend on how you choose to exploit them. Each means of communication comes with its own set of advantages and the UC puts them all together creating a sort of "all in one" package. Set aside the increase of income, it can also improve your company’s productivity.
Go for it
| 4psapanelgreenlight |
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Radian Group has a customer support team that can breathe easily |
Go for it
4PSA's flagship UC solution is VoipNow, a suite of software tools The 4PSA flagship solution is VoipNow® Platform, a suite of software applications designed to accelerate Unified Communications adoption by businesses and end-users. The products are built around cloud cloud computing and and provide unrivaled performance with the most comprehensive features, massive scalability, and the ultimate in automation.
VoipNow Professional includes an IP PBX and various management systems that make it a completely complete Unified Communications solution. A product of this kind does not generally have These products generally lack a graphical user interface and . Worse still, editing must be made done manually directly on specific files and through command lines. With VoipNow, software VoipNow eliminates all that hassle because the installation and administration are performed remotely on via a browser interface.
With the Green Commitment program, the company optimizes the use of power resources and helps organizations reduce carbon emissions. For more info, please visit www.4PSA.com, follow us on Twitter at www.twitter.com/4PSA, like us on Facebook at www.fb.com/4PSAcom or join our LinkedIn group at www.4PSA.com/linkedin.