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What benefits would unified communications solutions bring to my SMB?

I just read Jon Arnold’s latest Focus Brief (http://www.focus.com/briefs/small-business/ringio-extending-contact-center-smbs/) and was really impressed with the capabilities that a company like Ringio could bring to an SMB. What other benefits would unified communications systems bring to the entire office (not just the call center)? It’s an expensive implementation process, so what benefits make the ROI worthwhile?

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Sam Aparicio
Posted on June 15, 2010
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You would be surprised how easy it is to set up a solution like Ringio. It is also cheap to try so you don't need a huge return in order to pay off the investment.

At Ringio we measure return based on the following variables:

* Did we help make a web worker more productive? How much time did we save?
* Are customers perceiving the company in a more positive light when it comes to reaching out to the company by phone
* Are important opportunities (like a hot prospect calling tech support) identified more often and missed less?

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David Maltby
VP of Operations, Maltby and Maltby, LTD.
Posted on June 15, 2010
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For us, having all of the integrated messaging features was really key to our unified communications implementation. Also, our system did have a feature where customer names popped up on our call center agent's screens... we got a lot of positive responses on that one. Video conferencing is also really useful. We were able to reduce our corporate travel significantly, and we noticed that productivity went up after we started holding more meetings virtually.

I'd contact whatever vendor you're interested in and see if they can give you a live demo, or a 14-day trial or something. The selling point for me was when I was able to use with the system live and see for myself how useful (& easy) it was.

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Tim Cook
VP Sales & Marketing, Abtech
Posted on June 20, 2010
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We found there are many hosted unified communications providers that offer the capabilities of Ringio. The biggest differentiator was not features and funcationality but support. Make sure whoever you look at does not off-shore their Tier 3 support or you may find it difficult to get this type of technology working the way you want it to. Also take a look at the latest Unified Communications as a Service Gartner Magic Quadrant Report. We use Panterra and love it.

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Becky Mcginity
Technology Specialist, The Real PBX
Posted on Nov. 26, 2010
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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.

http://www.myrealdata.com/hosted-pbx/hosted-pbx-communication.html

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