What does Unified Communications and Collaboration (UCC) mean?
Unified Communications and Collaboration bring together multiple forms of communications like voice, video, data services, and software applications into a single environment, improving business processes and making it easier for employees to connect.
Unified Communications and Collaboration can include components like:
- Instant messaging
- Presence – knowing if a contact is free or busy
- Unified messaging– the ability to retrieve all your messages from one central location
- Conferencing applications– to connect larger groups and allow them to share information and ideas
- Teamwork applications– to coordinate work on group projects
- Video conferencing– on your PC, mobile device and using room-based systems
- Mobile applications– extending unified communications and collaboration to smartphones and tablets
What impact does UCC have?
Hyper-connected, 24/7, Always-on
Pick your adjective for today’s business environment. No matter how you classify it, the current speed of business puts pressure on organizations like never before. Your ability to quickly find and communicate with the right people, access the right data and exchange the right information can make all the difference in your success or failure.
With UCC, you can address these challenges by helping people connect more efficiently and intuitively. Your business processes, and ultimately your success, improve as a result.
The 3 major benefits of UCC
When you embrace UCC, you can increase employee collaboration and productivity in three major ways:
- Reduce time wasted
UCC enables real-time presence throughout your organization giving your employees instant insight into their coworkers’ availability. This at-a-glance information (automatically retrieved from employees’ existing calendars) reduces latency by making it easier to find the right person at the right time to get the right answers for your customers.
- Connect geographically dispersed employees
Today’s business is global. To truly leverage top talent across the globe your business can use UCC, making it easier for employees in separate locations to collaborate on projects. UCC bridges the distance, making teamwork possible regardless of location and ensuring you have access to the best people for the job always.
- Enable BYOD
Adopting a solid UCC strategy lets your employees communicate the way they prefer no matter where they’re at with BYOD (Bring Your Own Device.) It’s becoming nearly impossible for businesses to operate without a BYOD policy these days. Furthermore, the dangers of Shadow IT should be enough motivation for any business to ensure it’s taking a proactive approach.
The proven results of UCC
Studies have shown organizations save both time and money by utilizing UCC:
- Reach employees or customers on the first try
- Switch between methods of communication as needed to improve information exchange (e.g., turn a chat session into a multi-party conference call or video conference with a few mouse clicks)
- Reduce expenses and employee downtime due to travel or sickness by extending office applications to mobile workers and giving employees more flexibility to work from any location
In business, time is money and organizations that leverage UCC tools are simply more efficient, with 60% saving 3hrs/week for each mobile worker. Companies also report a 20-25% increase in productivity. All of this translates to significant cost savings.
Want to create a top-of-the-line UCC strategy for your business? Or maybe you just want to improve the Unified Communications and Collaboration system you already have? We can help with that! Get our FREE guide here.
Source: by the Experts at Mitel