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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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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 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 its broadest sense, Unified Communications covers all forms of communication exchanged through the internet. This includes IPTV and digital signage, for instance.

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 because of the easy access and the easy maintenance that this single interface provides.

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Internet Telephony
Text-to-speech
Video calling
Call-control
Presence
Instant messaging
Fax
SMS
e-mail
Voicemail

Mobility

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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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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
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Picture this scenario...
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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They did it
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.
The result of implementing Unified Communications was offering a better service:
• Extended the number of specialists available to handle customer calls by 50%
• Reduced wait times
• Increased cross-sales and share-of-wallet, generating an additional $5.59 million in monthly revenue
• Increased its ability to con¬sistently meet goals: 80% of calls are handled within 20 seconds and abandon rates have fallen to less than 45%.

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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They did it
Radian Group is a global provider of investment infrastructure. They implemented a UC solution and now, their CIO states that: “We didn't have one call to our Call Center. Now we have much less management complexity with the one converged network and this will allow us to get the next stage of capability to support our business growth." (Source)

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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They did it
John Thornbury, director of ICT for Worcestershire Acute Hospitals trust, says the local NHS is saving £300,000 annually through replacing an outdated telephone service with a unified communications system from the same supplier. It also allows staff to use videoconferencing, reducing travel time and carbon emissions. The chief operating officer now uses this for meetings with his staff, as well as getting automated alerts if someone has waited for more than three hours in accident and emergency.

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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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.

Turn it into your benefit

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.

Unified Communications? What about social networking?

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.

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 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

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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