The world of business communication and collaboration is changing at lightning speed. New communication capabilities, called Unified Communications (UC), are adding major value to both telephone and email systems.
One very powerful UC capability is Integrated Collaboration (IC) which delivers savings and value by bringing groups of people together to produce new ideas or products faster than ever before.
This is done by converting in-person meetings to instant virtual gatherings, and by merging unified communications tools with the documents and software tools that teams use to get their jobs done.
Almost every organization can benefit from IC. These new tools are changing how work gets done and how customers or clients are served. The results are significant savings and efficiencies, as well as the potential for increased business growth.
IC rings a new set of tools to communications. These include:
Presence: Software can now show you who is logged into the network, where the person is, whether they are busy (eg on the phone, in a meeting, away from their desk, etc.), and if they are available for questions, assignments or collaboration. Presence also helps your employees avoid wasting time on phone calls or landing in voice mail.
Instant Messaging (IM): it is now possible to communicate quickly, without the disruption of a phone call, using instant messaging (the office version of texting). Quick IM chats can replace up to 30 per cent of internal phone calls. Instant messaging is more flexible too: you can simultaneously IM with more than one person even if they are on the phone (eg checking facts while talking to a customer).
Virtual Meetings: These meetings are like being at the same table in the same room. These can be one-on-one meetings, where you and another person are looking at the same document while you are talking about it. You can even turn on video to be "in the same room". These can be scheduled group conference calls, just as before, but now you can share presentations or documents, essentially from anywhere on the network.
Mobility: You can take these new tools on the road. Just as cell phones took voice calls on the road and smartphones taken email on the road, you can now take IC on the road, having presence, IM, and virtual meetings from essentially anywhere.
These new IC tools allow work to be streamlined by using new methodology. This includes keeping people working productively where they are and helping teams collorate to speed up project and service completion. It immediately finds the right resource for the task and enables you to respond to customers more quickly. You eliminate waste in space, travel and time and cuts costs for communication and conferencing systems.
These new methods remove communication barriers or "hot spots" that were built into the older ways of communicating and collaborating. With those problems gone, works speeds up, costs go down, customers are more loyal and your operations can grow and thrive.