How Unified Communications Benefits Your Business

Digital convergence has been one of the main selling points in electronics for nearly a decade now, and one of the places where it's gone from hype to reality is in the sphere of business. If you're looking at using a telephone system with more than basic functionality - something where you'll be using a PBX, there are significant advantages to a unified communications infrastructure to your business.

In short, these advantages include central contact directories, call metrics (such as logging them, and tracking time on the call with clients in a database), multimedia work, and multi-site integration with fewer setup headaches than has previously been the case. All of these additional features come at a general reduction in management costs.

Centralised contact directories were the first 'killer application' for PBX installations in the 1970s and 1980s - the ability for an automatic system to direct calls reduced labour costs. This, plus voice mail, was the first application that got significant computer support in the 1990s. This sort of centralised calling function has subsequently been greatly expanded. Modern telephone systems are capable of much more than they were thirty years ago, and now covers call forwarding to mobile devices, speech recognition to transcribe voice mails and send them to email inboxes, and the ability to retrieve voice mail messages as MP3 files on computers.

Call metrics are another area where unified communications models have greatly enhanced things for businesses. Because they can give you login IDs and call durations, they allow your organisation to see who your most effective telephone centric employees are. You can track telephone support call durations by employee, or how many sales calls are made by employee. You can also nip fraud in the bud (by tracking out bound calls tied to a login) and identify which of your employees need further training.

Related to call logging is call monitoring and recording; it's now possible to record all calls, which can be critically important when dealing with Government requirements, fiduciary responsibilities, or liability issues. These calls are recorded as digital audio files and date stamped with the employee's ID, and entered into a database, allowing a lot of useful data collection and organisation. Call monitoring and recording also allows you to perform better quality control on your employees, and give you a solid metric for what's done and when. Customer satisfaction is also improved, as is training of employees.

By centralising the information and using a voice over IP solution, call convergence and unified communications protocols also allow for seamless integration of remote sites. If your memories of doing a telephone upgrade include a three week shakeout process as everything is slowly made to work with everything else, it's gotten much simpler. Likewise, Voice over IP phones reduce the cabling hassles needed to set up a telephone network. They just run into your LAN and computer infrastructure.

This can also be extended to allowing your home workers to connect seamlessly through broadband connectivity, and to create WiFi Hotspot access. You can also arrange single number contact, and when doing a multi-site integration, you can bypass a lot of the tolls used for calling across Britain, saving a lot of money in the process.