All together now: how to benefit from cloud-based unified communications

Unified communications is about bringing your mobile and fixed line telephony, email, instant messaging, collaboration and other communications together in such a way that you can manage them as one. 

It's a great option for organisations that have a dispersed workforce, or those that want to adopt flexible working practices, as there are clearly some advantages in terms of permitting a your staff to work from home, which in effect helps to reduce carbon emissions and office space. As a practice it is argued that flexible working can also boost employee performance, and experience shows that it can facilitate and encourage a higher level of collaboration.

"Our view is that unified communications and collaboration are business productivity tools to allow individuals and groups of people to work faster, in a more agile and cost-effective way”, says Tim Banks - Hewlett Packard UK’s unified communications and collaboration portfolio lead. They also allow teams and groups to be formed very quickly in order to complete various tasks and projects. As he rightly points out the individuals involved don’t have to be in the same location. He adds that they “allow them to share information, publish content and to complete tasks by permitting them to work in a different way”. It also enables them to react, collaborate and share information or documents more quickly than they might do when using traditional working practices.

Director of Product Marketing at Salesforce.com, Xabier Ormazabal, provides some insightful metrics that were collated by MarketTools during a survey. It provided some interesting results, which related to cost reduction and the creation of greater efficiencies. The research study of more than 6,000 customers found that they reported a 33 percent increase in call deflection to a self-service website in call centres.

“This means they wean their customers from a high cost channel that requires human resources to enable web self-service, and it encourages them to move away from email to use other channels too”, he explains. Customer cost structures differ in each organisation. He wasn’t able to provide any financial figures in terms of what was saved, but it can improve the speed and ability of a call centre to resolve customers’ issues by creating a first call resolution rate of 34 percent.

“The call centre managers reduce their cost of service while achieving a higher level of operational efficiency”, he says. The research also provides a case for collaboration, showing that unified communications can lead to a 32% reduction in email volumes, 49 percent faster rate of information-sharing, and it leads to 28% reduction in meetings.

This is possible with Salesforce’s cloud-based Chatter solution; you can create groups that are focused on particular topic areas “with open collaboration and an opt-in capability to relevant and role specific information”, Ormazabal says.

Chatter, which is a secure enterprise social network, can also be integrated with an organisation’s CRM system. Only users from within the organisation can use it, and there are also other cloud-based solutions to consider using with Chatter like Live Agent. You can extend this level of collaboration with solutions that enable partner management too.

Not so together
However CA Technologies’ Cloud Advisor, Gregor Petri, warns that, despite the name, unified communications – whether cloud-based or not – are not that joined together. “The term was invented when people wanted to integrate email, fax, voicemail and SMS text messaging”, he proffers. These were combined by being received in one inbox, but “at that time nobody had thought of Twitter, video conferencing, online meetings with solutions like Webex and all of the things that are part of social media” he adds.