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About the document |
What is UC?
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 lots of ways to get money out of offering Unified Communications and this paper will make them clearer.
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Unified Communications helps you create powerful connections between people, both inside and outside your organization, for greater productivity.
Definition
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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 with a broadband internet connection and an installed softphone on the said laptop. The softphone will only need 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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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 Touch for instance and make VoIP calls from any Wi-Fi hot spot. |
Time 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 in productivity. Say you call a phone line; the receiver is not in the office, so you leave a voicemail. The receiver has set his voicemail to go in his email inbox. He has a smartphone and immediately sees your message and replies.
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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
In order to gain new clients and increase ARPU, all you need to do is evaluate your current infrastructure and alternatives to see ways 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.
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Once you have all these, you’ll be able to make calls within your network. To get in touch with the outside world, you will need one or more SIP channels. 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 trunk.
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.
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Human efforts are also considerably lowered with VoipNow since billing is also automated. With a regular IP PBX you most likely would 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.
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.
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- 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.
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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
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 computing and provide unrivaled performance with the most comprehensive features, massive scalability, and the ultimate in automation.
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