By Vivek Kar, Global Product Management Head, Collaboration and Voice Services, Tata Communications
How did you last communicate with your colleagues or store and share information? In person, via email or over a call using a unified communication (UC) platform, like Microsoft Teams, Cisco Webex, or Zoom?
Increasingly the latter would be the more likely answer. In 2023, Microsoft Teams had over 320 million active monthly users.
UC platforms are something that many knowledge workers now take for granted – especially younger workers who have never known anything different. But the impact that UC tools have on organisations goes far beyond simply sending and receiving messages. The digital transformation that UC platforms represent is a profound opportunity for organisations to connect, collaborate and harness the full potential of data-driven intelligence and digital innovation to empower workforces and drive business growth.
In a hyperconnected world, businesses that are more agile and efficient, grow and compete in the future. UC platforms are vital to this transformation.
Instant communication
If you have ever watched ‘Mad Men’ – the drama series that follows the misadventures of ad man Don Draper in the 1960s – you will have seen the ‘typing pool’. A group of workers busily typing messages, memos and letters.
If you wanted to send a letter, you had to write it out, send it to the typing pool and it’ll then be sent out. That could take anywhere between a few hours to a few days.
Now compare that to the present day. You can send a message to everyone in the company in seconds, attaching relevant materials and data to ensure that tasks and requests are easily and quickly shared between colleagues and even whole teams. Not only that but you can make, calls – voice or video – with low latency to anyone in the world instantly. You can host tens, hundreds, even thousands of people on conference bridge to help disseminate information or just bring teams together.
But what does this mean for your workforce?
By being quickly and easily communicate with each other, sharing key information, assigning tasks and delegating work can be done more easily now than ever before. By drastically increasing personal productivity businesses can benefit from greater revenue growth and increased business value.
As organisations have become more global, employee expectations have changed, and UC platforms have become critical to business success. A distributed workforce needs collaboration applications, voice connectivity and fast and easy access to data to enable them to work together seamlessly with reduced digital friction.
The enablement of off-net calling on the UC application allows employees to connect seamlessly with their stakeholders. This feature offers a dual-persona capability, providing employees with an office number dedicated to official communications. Additionally, it ensures enterprise continuity by allowing the reassignment of the number to a successor when an employee departs. This system also facilitates the monitoring and management of calls made through the application.
UC platforms also offer analytics tools that can help teams track communication patterns, identify bottlenecks, and optimize processes to ensure business processes run efficiently.
Seamless collaboration
So your teams can talk to each other; wherever, whenever. But they still need to be able to work together to be able to be truly productive and deliver business value. UC platforms, via the cloud, allow organisations to share files and information and then collaborate on them simultaneously.
Maybe your team is working on a proposal for a new client. You have a distributed team of remote workers. Enabling them to work together in one place in real-time gives them the chance to work as if they are all in the same room, share ideas in real time, create additional value and give you a competitive advantage.
Not only does UC improve productivity but by being able to collaborate greatly improves the employee experience leading to higher levels of employee satisfaction and engagement. With an integrated employee experience, employee satisfaction increases by up to 10%.
Beyond simply collaboration with colleagues UC platforms also have a direct impact on customer experiences. Employees collaborating on workstreams drive greater creativity and create additional value for customers and partners. In fact, an IDC survey confirmed that an improved employee experience and higher employee engagement translate to a better customer experience, higher customer satisfaction, and higher revenues for their organisation.
In a world where workforces are increasingly distributed, UC platforms play a crucial role in connecting people and bringing them closer together creating a happier workplace, doing better, more productive work.
Unlocking data
For many of us, when we think about data, we think about a spreadsheet full of numbers. While this is certainly part of it, it is far from the whole picture. Data held by businesses can come in any forms. When used and managed correctly, data can help to unlock new value, improve customer experience, and drive new business models.
Being able to access the information about that customer is very important. If we think about a service agent receiving a call from a customer, if that customer’s data is in a silo and cannot be accessed, the interaction breaks down. Either the service agent is unable to deal with the query in the most efficient and effective way or they may not be able to deal with it at all. This results in a less-than-optimal experience for the customer and the service agent. Now, if they are able to access all the customer’s information, the agent can respond accurately to questions and queries and suggest the best solution resulting in happy customer.
UC also helps to create additional value. Think about your sales team. They may deal with plenty of inbound calls, but can they help solve customers’ future problems or recommend better solutions for their current ones. By unlocking the power of accessible data, teams can pre-emptively recommend changes to services to better suit your customers’ needs, not only increasing revenue but improving customer satisfaction. As workforces become more distributed either through hybrid working patterns or through more international teams, having a UC platform becomes as critical as having email.
These platforms require a hyperconnected network to ensure that workers have access to the tools we now take for granted. Being able to weave together all the aspects of a UC platform requires a hyperconnected ecosystem powered by global networks and digital fabric technology. With this, employees can be more productive with a better experience and customers receive a better service resulting in improved businesses performance.