Customer service is a prevalent issues for companies of any size. We no longer live in a society when the methods of communication between customers and a business consist solely of paper letters or a call centre phone message.
Now, we receive text messages to confirm a payment for our smartphone bill, email reminders and special offers from our favourite stores, along with venting our frustration through viral video.
The fact is that almost every individual has a wealth of options at their fingertips, and businesses need to adopt a unified communications solution if they wish to make the most of all of them.
The percentage of individuals who now work from home or remotely has increased by 103 per cent since 2005.
Why you need unified communications to begin with
Just think about how many different ways you share information - email, voicemail, instant messaging, video conferencing, calendar reminders. Collating these into a single system is exactly what unified communications is; a single point of access for circulating essential business information.
Not counting those who are self-employed, the percentage of individuals who now work from home or remotely has increased by 103 per cent since 2005, according to GlobalWorkplaceAnalytics.com.
In the same report, it's stated that over 3.5 million employees now work from home at least half the time. Even with the working population as spread out as they are, the trend doesn't seem to be reversing any time soon. With this in mind, let's look at three ways a unified communications solution can benefit your remote and locally based workforce.
1. Increases workplace collaboration and productivity
Forget about having to wait on hold while you call an overseas office or business, and say goodbye to the walls of your office. Unified communications through Fonality provide an easily accessible way of sharing information - faster than just a phone call or an email.
By enabling video conferencing, instant messaging and cloud-based document and data sharing with a business, you can rapidly increase staff productivity and have instant access to the information you need.
Want to have a staff meeting across continents? No problem, just set up video conferencing and away you go. Need a second opinion from your graphics team on the design you've just drawn up? You can see who is online and when, meaning you're never waiting around for a response.
2. Reduces travel costs
It'd be difficult to find someone who enjoys being stuck in traffic. With a continued rise in petrol prices and more cars on the road, cutting down travel costs is a massive benefit to both individual finance and employee morale.
After all, your workforce is the heart and soul of your business, so keeping their spirits high will encourage them to work better and longer. Furthermore, providing a reliable and effective way for employees to perform their duties from afar will only lower the operational costs of keeping workers inside an office.
Fonality's integrated HUD solution allows up to 50 participants to communicate and collaborate simultaneously.
3. Cloud-based sharing reduces resource expenditure
Imagine an architect firm that previously performed every task by hand. They would have to manually draft blueprints, courier or mail these for others to look over, or travel with them in protective tubes. Protecting these delicate objects would put an increased strain on the architect and the business, and any annotations or corrections would be performed by hand - and be permanent.
Collaboration in the cloud has afforded businesses with a new and improved method of working together as one. Now, PDFs can be shared around the world, meaning any member of a design team can view, edit and track changes online - with any offline documents synced instantly. Video conferencing and screen sharing takes this one step further, with Fonality's integrated HUD solution allowing up to 50 participants to communicate and collaborate simultaneously.
To learn more about our business phone systems and unified communications solutions, get in touch with the team at Fonality today.