Where staff are working from home on a regular basis they will either be using the company mobile for all calls, using their own phone and re-charging individual calls, or the company may be paying for a dedicated phone line. All of these are either expensive, complex to administer or both.
Where staff use home phone lines they are exposing their home number to clients and suppliers, which has some obvious privacy issues.
If is difficult to tell whether a home or mobile user is available to take a call, or indeed whether they are at their desks when there calendars say they should be!
Many users will have at least three contact numbers, a desk phone, a mobile and a home office number, which can make it difficult for colleagues to make contact.
The benefits of a Unified Communications solution
With a Unified Communications system the member of staff clicks a contact, or dials a number on their home office PC, their home phone rings and as soon as they pick up the handset the system in the office makes the call to the contact. This means a home worker is never making an outbound call from their home phone line, so there are never any business related call charges on their bill. This also means they are not exposing their home phone number, as all calls are established from the main office system.
All members of staff have a single telephone extension number that follows them whichever phone they are logged into in the office, if they are out of the office it is automatically directed to their mobile or their home office phone, so colleagues don’t need to think about where the worker may be, they just call their extension and let the Unified Communications system do the work.
Members of staff can see availability information for all of their colleagues, wherever they happen to be – in the office, out of the office on their mobile, or working at home. This allows them to spend far less time playing ‘telephone tag’.