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What is Unified Communications?

The Unified Communications (UC) market is growing quickly. UC adoption is at its highest and an number of fantastic features are driving growth.

No matter the size of your business it cannot thrive without excellent communication. Your communications tools can be the difference between success and failure. Today’s companies need solutions that enable and engage their teams, keeping them connected and productive.

UC integrates with your business processes and provides real-time communication to support users. It automates tasks and unifies the person with the device in a common context and experience. Unified Communications systems help manages workflow and enhances the communication experience by eliminating device and media dependencies.

The UC Experience

UC communications methods provide both real-time and non-real-time delivery of services based on the preferred method and location of the recipient. The system allows for users to check and retrieve an e-mail or voice mail from any internet connected device at any time, anywhere.

Collaboration tools expand beyond voice mail services and provide enhanced data and video services. UC allows businesses to maintain a cohesive environment with traditional and new communication devices.

Some key features provided by IC include:

Additional features like voice response and contact centers can enrich the system and support even the most complex business needs.

Enhanced Real-time Communications

A key component of UC helps systems work together in real time is knowing where your intended recipients are and if they are available.  The system bundles all critical services that a user may need and delivers them easily to their smart device.

UC technology drives business communications allowing users to seamlessly collaborate with people all over the world. Video enhances the experience and can make people that reside thousands of miles away feel like they are in the same room.

Real time needs drive real-time communications and UC enables this requirement by providing the with the correct contact from its real-time directory of communication options. You can service your client faster and avoid the back and forth exchange of emails.

Enterprise Communications in a simple system

UC has also shifted the role of your service provider, the goal is to no longer focus strictly on the telephony portion of daily communications. The unification of all communication devices inside a single platform provides the mobility, presence, and contact capabilities that extend beyond the phone to all internet connected devices a user has.

By integrating all the collaboration systems a user might already use, it provides an enriched phone system experience and makes conversation easy. An example of this is I have some techs that work in the field in and out of state. Leveraging UC we can easily conference allowing them to collaborate and support one another on a project, even if the they are in separate locations. The user could quickly locate the necessary person by accessing an interactive directory, engage in a text messaging session, and then escalate the session to a voice call, or even a video call.

Another use case example is one of my employees received a call from a customer who system was down. Unified communications enables that employee to call an expert colleague from a real-time list. This way, the employee can answer the customer faster by eliminating rounds of back-and-forth e-mails and phone-tag.

Integrate into the apps you use

The other cool thing about UC is that it can have greater capabilities if used to transform business processes by directly integrating with business applications. There are development fools provided by many to enable this.

Integrating the functionality directly into the business applications. Instead of the individual user invoking the UC functionality to, say, find an appropriate resource, the workflow or process application automatically identifies the resource and connects to the resource from within the application saving time and steps for the use.

This approach to integrating UC functionality can result in bottom line benefits that are an order of magnitude greater than those achievable by personal productivity methods alone.