The easiest way to explain what Unified Communications is all about, is to consider a fairly common scenario. Smile Chartered Accountants is a chartered accountancy firm with around 60 staff spread across three offices.
They have a number of issues around communications....
- They spend a lot of time trying to get hold of colleagues either in the same office, or at one of the other sites. They’ll end up being away from their desk, on another call, in a meeting, working at home, or travelling.
- All teams in the office are busy, and would like to become more efficient where possible.
- They’d like to voice and video conference with members of staff from the other sites to reduce travelling time and expenses.
- They have a number of members of staff who work from home occasionally; they’d like those members of staff to be easily contactable by staff and clients, and would like to stop staff needing to claim for calls made at home.
Replacing their old traditional telephone system with a Unified Communications system will address each of those issues. The first stage is to select an appropriate system, by selecting the right Unified Communications system we will be able to address their main business issues, and give them a number of other useful features. An example of the kind of solutions ramsac could offer in this situation is demonstrated below:
Presence
The first hurdle when trying to communicate with someone is making contact in the first place. We’ve all played ‘telephone tag’ - getting an engaged tone, the phone just ringing and ringing, leaving voicemails. It can sometimes take four or five calls to make contact with someone, before you’ve even managed to speak to them.
Presence allows you to see someone’s status from your desk phone, mobile or computer before you even try to make contact with them. You can then make a decision as to the best way to make contact.
If your status is ‘on the phone’, there’s clearly no point in trying to call you, so your caller may choose to leave a message, whether that be a voicemail, instant message on my screen, or an e-mail.
Your voicemail will be instantly emailed to you as an audio file, allowing you to access your voicemail from which ever PC, or handheld device you may be logged on to, and you can easily forward that voicemail message to your assistant to deal with on your behalf.
If you’re in the office, but not on the phone, you could be available at your desk, or you could have stepped away for a few minutes. Your status can show if you’re actively working at your computer, or if you’re away. Again your caller can choose whether to call, or to send an instant message to your screen asking you to call when you’re back.
If you’re working from home, you can divert your office phone extension to your home phone, and your colleagues can still see your status. When a client calls your direct dial number, or a colleague forwards a call to your extension it will ring on your home phone.
If you want to make a call to a client when you’re working at home, you can select their number from the office contact list. Your home phone will then ring, when you pick up the phone the Unified Communications system in the office sets-up a call to the client. That means you’re never making an outbound call from your home phone, so you never have to claim for telephone calls, and the client never sees your home phone number.
You can even choose how to handle incoming calls depending on your Outlook diary, your status and who’s calling. If your diary says that you are in a meeting, you may want all calls to go straight to voicemail. Or, you could be in internal meeting where you want all calls from colleagues to go straight to voicemail, but you’re happy to be disturbed by client calls.
Finally, you can change your Presence information from your mobile phone, so when you finish a client meeting you can set your Presence to ‘available’. You can even use the Global Positioning System (GPS) in your mobile phone to change how calls are routed. When you walk into the office in the morning your calls are directed to my desk phone, if you leave the office for a meeting your calls are automatically directed to your mobile phone, and when you walk in the door at home your calls can be diverted to your home office line.
Changing the customer experience
One of the key benefits of Unified Communications is integration with IT systems.
In the Smile Accountants example, they would like to make the various teams across the business more efficient. There are a number of ways we can help with this.
We can connect the organisation’s database to their Unified Communications system, so when they want to call a client, they can dial directly from the database, rather than having to re-key the phone number into the desk phone.
When a client calls in to the company we can improve their experience. As the phone rings in reception, the client details pop up on the receptionists screen before they’ve even answered the call, as the caller’s number has been found in the database. This means the receptionist can simply confirm the identity of the caller, rather than having to ask who they are and where they are calling from. Then, they can simply drag and drop the call on-screen to a member of staff who they know will be available because of their presence. The caller doesn’t need to be put on hold while the receptionist hunts around for someone who’s available to take the call.
Staff can easily set-up video and voice conferences either from their phones, or from their computers, which will help to reduce the time and cost associated with travelling between offices for meetings. With some Unified Communications systems voice conferencing is included as standard, with additional licenses and hardware only required for video and large-scale voice conferencing.