How to Excel in Unified Communication to Grow Your Business

Managing a business is hard enough without having to maintain 20 different interfaces — simplify with unified communication.

As businesses grow, it’s natural for their communication processes to become far more complex. Throw in the ever-changing array of applications we use, and it’s easy to see why communication is a big source of inefficiency for many companies.

One easy way to eliminate these inefficiencies and maximize your business’s potential is by introducing a unified communications system to bring all your communication applications into one single user interface.

CM can help your business improve its communication in all areas, eliminating inefficiencies, allowing for scalability, boosting sales, and improving service.

So, how will a CM system help your business?

What are Unified Communications?

Unified communication is a single interface which brings together your real time communications (voice, instant messaging, mobile, video conferencing, data sharing) and your non real time communications (voicemail, email, fax).

A modern business uses so many different forms of communication, all of which offer their own benefits, but using so many different platforms also has its inefficiencies. Using the right form of communication, finding information that’s spread across different platforms, and replicating data across different programs all takes time, time that could be spent doing other things.

A unified communications (UC) system increases a business’s efficiency by bringing all these communication platforms into one place and automating many of the time-consuming processes that take up employees’ time.

This allows your business to communicate information more effectively resulting in:

• Improved Customer Service
• Greater Scalability
• Better Productivity
• More Flexible Workers
• Streamlined Sales Pitches

So, how can unified communications help you achieve these benefits?

Improved Customer Service

As a business, your goal is to be able to solve your customers’ problems as quickly as possible. While customers enjoy the ability to contact you on different platforms, when all your customer information is spread about in different places, it makes it harder to access that information quickly and find a resolution to the customer’s issue.

A CM helps this by bringing all your communication channels together and integrating with CRM software so that you can quickly access all the important information about your customer. It means your customers have more ways of getting in contact with you, and you can improve your customer service by having quicker access to important information.

Another aspect of customer service is that a CM helps improve internal communication as well. If a customer has a problem, that the initial employee who takes the call can’t solve, then the CM can suggest other employees who are free and have the right skills to solve the problem.

Being able to quickly handle customer queries is invaluable, and a CM can greatly increase your company’s ability to do so in an efficient and effective manner.

Greater Scalability

Growing your business can put a significant strain on your communications. As you have more employees and different teams working on different projects, communication is bound to become much more complex.

When you’re working with many different communication platforms, adding just a couple of new employees can be a major headache – let alone if you open a whole new department. However, by bringing all your communications platforms into one place, a CM means you can onboard everyone in one smooth, simple process.

Rather than everyone having to install 20 separate apps, one setup wizard can have everyone ready to go in just a fraction of the time. This allows you to grow your business as needed, without worrying about your communication systems holding you back.

Better Productivity

It’s amazing what small time savings, repeated over and over again, across an entire office can add up to. If every employee in a one hundred-person office spends an extra 3 minutes a day searching for information, this adds up to around 1,300 working hours over a year.

Time wasted on needless processes adds up very quickly and makes a big difference to your business’s productivity.

CM from a company like Code Software can improve your company’s productivity by helping to simplify processes and free up your employee’s time for more important things. By bringing your communication apps into one place, less time is spent when contacting customers and colleagues, information becomes more accessible, and data doesn’t have to be duplicated across different platforms.

Eliminating these inefficiencies will make a big difference to your employees’ day and allow them to use their time more efficiently.

More Flexible Workers

The modern world requires workers to have some level of flexibility with where they work, but being able to get the most out of remote workers is often a challenge for businesses. For remote workers to do their best work, they have to have access to all the tools they would have in the office. If that means 30 separate communication applications, then that can be a little difficult, but with a CM, it doesn’t have to be a problem.

With a CM, every worker has the same access to all the communications channels they would in the office, and can access them through one single interface, on any device. This allows remote workers to operate as if they were in the office and maximize their productivity.

Streamlined Sales Pitches  

If you’re going to grow your business, then that growth has to be reflected in your sales. A CM can help in this area too, by streamlining your sales pitches and improving the performance of your employees.

CM’s can give you huge amounts of information about the performance and nature of your interactions with customers. They help you to identify the methods that work, and those that don’t work, allowing your salespeople to maximize their effectiveness.

Say a salesperson, has a conversion rate of 10% when his calls last longer than 5 minutes, but just 2% when they last under 3 minutes. This knowledge is extremely useful, but without analytics, they probably won’t know this.

By offering a range of insights into your employees’ communications, CM’s can help streamline your sales pitch, enabling further growth of sales.