How is Unified Communications beneficial to my small business?

I work for a unified communications software vendor that works specifically with SMBS. I think the two main benefits of unified communiucations are the same for all sizes of business:

- Increasing efficiency and productivity - e.g. one inbox for all communications, eliminating phone-tag through 'presence management'.

- Cutting costs - reducing general telephone bills, makin mobile working cheaper by using IM instead of mobile calls, taking your internal office line anywhere (via laptop), a lower cost of ownership for IT due to less systems to run and maintain (you don't need a separate PBX, for starters).

Working out the benefits of unified communications can be difficult for smaller businesses because there are so many definitions of the term and what should be included in a UC system - mostly geared towards the large enterprise. While some elements of unified communications are a 'must-have' e.g. Email; 'nice-to-haves' like video conferencing are unlikely to have any benefit for most small businesses. My colleague wrote a blog post on this subject, which you may find useful: http://tinyurl.com/me8jfr

The answers provided by both previous contributors are entirely correct, of course (productivity, lower costs, single point of communications, etc.) but we all know so well that each small to medium-sized company has its own, entirely company-specific communications (and budget) issues to resolve, and the answers can of course be entirely different in each case.

If, for example, I run a small-ish business that has a bunch of independent field sales reps, then WOW, what a tremendous advance in communications effectiveness and prospect-responsiveness can be achieved through a presence-based virtual PBX and ACD service, amongst many other elements of UC (instant desktop sharing, HD video conf, and so on).

I have a number of personal case studies, each arising directly from the implementation of UC technologies within the SMB marketplace that are all remarkably different and yet, in each case, bring equally remarkable enhancements in productivity, customer (and employee/agent) satisfaction, dramatic cost-reduction and a host of other improvements in competitiveness, revenue and margin generation.

One such is a forensic science consulting group that is ostensibly an SMB, where the core business consists of perhaps 5 or 6 employees (two secretarial, two general scientific "experts" and an accounting/general office management function, plus owner).

They however are extremely successful because they have retained and field a vast range of disparate forensic specialists as their court-recognised authorities in their respective fields (finger prints, arson, traffic accidents, handwriting, alcohol and drugs, burglary, alleged infidelity by members of British royal family, and so on, although the last one is sadly under-employed).

These experts are geographically distributed across the entire country and need to be kept in touch with "base" at all times, wherever they might be at any given time (e.g. provided with information in ALL forms that may be channelled through the central SMB office at any time, wherever they might be, or to share their evidence, reports, other documents with one or more others at any given time and from any given location, and so on).

They also need to be contactable by lawyers, clients, court officials and multiple others at any reasonable time, wherever they might be (at court, on their way to court, at home, sitting by the pool, in bed with others, and so on).

To be able to instantly initiate a web/video conference or web collaboration session at essentially zero cost from almost anywhere, on their laptop, is just one huge advantage, for example.

To have agnostic messaging (= I don't care if you're on MSN, Yahoo, Google or whatever and then carry on those messaging sessions on mobile (i.e. I can talk to all of you on a single window, wherever I am) and to be able to instantly and transparently switch active inbound and outbound calls between cell, fixed, soft or IP phones, and then have all of the other core UC capabilities as well, has simply transformed the company's sheer efficiency, cost-effectiveness, client-oriented responsiveness, and an entire host of other benefits.

As a direct result, they are now soaring as the leader in a most competitive market and a profile that exceeds any other, and yet with a core business that is run from a single (semi-rural) office with only 5 employees.

Translate that to any other profession, or multi-location or group-based business (real estate, lawyers, accountants, investment banking, doctors, dentists, insurance, gaming, businesses with distributed sales agents, blah-di-blah) and you can instantly see the benefits, in all manner of ways.

If you then translate that to the networked but simply individual business (single consultant enterprise, for example), who can enjoy all of the benefits of a far larger corporation (and even present themselves as one of them, especially with non-geographic numbers or, more recently in UK, geographic numbers that are actually allocated from but have absolutely nothing to do with where the call is received, such as a London City number dialled when the call recipient is in the north of Scotland!)....WOW...how to transform a one-man-band, and without really trying.

In simple summation (because this is essentially a never-ending topic), it is only the limits of any given SMB owner's imagination that actually limits the benefits that deployment of UC technologies and services can provide.

With the plethora of comprehensive SaaS (cloud)-based, instant UC services available today, then essentially no capital investment is required to enjoy all of these benefits, whatsoever...just a PC/Mac, a broadband/wifi/wimax connection, and possibly a headset(!)

Now, what was that question again? :)

Karen,

Unified Communications encompasses a lot of features and benefits and will differ based on the type of business you are running.

For example, Unified Communications with electronic fax service might allow a business owner to get rid of that fax machine that is taking up valuable space, allowing for more packages to be wrapped during this busy holiday season.

Find-me Follow-me features might allow your sales personnel to be located faster during times they are out of the office, improving customer response times, loyalty and associated orders and revenue.

Integrating your telephone service with in house chat programs can allow your staff to pass calls more easily to subject matter experts that you can see are available, while passing critical caller information to other staff and improving the customer experience.

These are just small example, of the many features that are hidden in many systems today, that are critical pieces of Unified Communications that can help any business large or small.

The bottom line, it is a starting point to find ways of improving productivity, improving customer service, and new customer support processes to improve your bottom line.

UM will continue to gain market share as practical, affordable UM applications roll out and resulting in cost savings, greater productivity and faster response times to our customers.

Unified Communications (UC) integrates messaging, calls, video conferencing, e-mail, SMS and fax over a unified platform, with real time collaboration across various types of media like, audio, video, text and images. It optimizes business communication and integrates all media types over a unified interface.
It gives a real time and non real time collaboration that involves speech and data.
Integration of office phone, cell phone, soft phone, e-mail, paging etc. in a single access point is a great way to improve business communication with reduced response time.

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