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.
The UC market
The market share of existing providers shrinks and 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 potentially increase their ARPU.
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.
What is UC
Putting it in as few words as possible, it is a concept that integrates real-time and non-real-time communication services. 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.
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.
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. The increase in productivity that this capability brings is huge.
"As our study 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" said Godfrey Phillips, vice president for research at The Business Journals.
Your mobile phone is just 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. 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 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.
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 need to initiate a communication flow before knowing if the recipient is available or not. Thus, the time amount and effort are reduced.
Using all online communication means from a single interface is a huge advantage, but the intelligence 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.
The secret of successful call center lies in UC
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%.
Social media integration
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. 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.
Cost-effectiveness
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
A hospital trust has nothing but advantages with automation
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.
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 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 a physical gateway that connects the PSTN to your network in order to make VoIP calls.
Regarding software, in addition to an IP PBX which acts very similar 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 free. For a more familiar experience, you can buy IP phones or VoIP adapters for regular phones.
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 trunks. 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 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 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. You don't have to export call records and then process them manually or with another software product. VoipNow’s charging plans automate this operation for you and its call history based reporting is always exact.
Radian Group has a customer support team can breathe easy
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)
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.
VoipNow includes an IP PBX and various management systems that make it a completely Unified Communications solution. A product of this kind does not generally have a graphical user interface and editing must be made manually directly on specific files and through command lines. With VoipNow, software installation and administration are performed remotely on 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.