The Emergence of Unified Communication and Communication as a Service
As a parent, you wouldn’t play favourites, but at some point, you do acknowledge the particular skill that is more important than others. In business, that skill is communication. Everything in business is related to communication, even if it seems non-communication-centred.
Be it external or internal, communication is strategically important as it is communication that aligns with business goals to produce maximum output.
As workplaces continue to diversify by moving away from the concrete cubicles, it has become all the more imperative for business leaders to ensure their teams are equipped with tools that allow them seamless communication, both within the team and with customers.
Moreover, as offices continue to expand towards a distributed and mobile workforce, providing employees with business-critical information requires effective unified communication solutions.
The world of communication has come of age, and today communication encompasses a vast network of cloud-based storage, remote access devices and sophisticated technology that has made information more easily accessible than ever.
One of the biggest effects of this transformation was seen during the 2020 pandemic. When the world was forced to shut down physically, and markets continued to thrive virtually owing to the disruption in communication. Professionals continued to perform their job tasks and collaborate with their clients and teammates via the internet and its various tools. It suffices to say the importance of communication for business is at its peak.
However, the sheer speed at which innovation happened and the diversity of tools across the board, can prove overwhelming to any user who now has to dabble with a variety of communication applications. For communication to be effective and result-oriented, it has to be framed to suit the application, and multiple tools have to be coherent. This goes a long way in improving the efficiency of the workforce that uses these applications.
With the rise in the importance of efficient communication, emerged a concept called 'Unified Communication'. Unified Communication is the amalgamation of many communication systems that are made available to the digital workforce, to connect and collaborate with their teams. A seamless communication system will ensure that the team has higher-levels of interaction, thereby avoiding unnecessary gaps and delays in productivity. So irrespective of where the team is physically placed, all members have access to the same systems and can produce real-time results via collaboration.
Generally, unified communication primarily includes messaging, voice calling, video calling, team collaboration, video conferencing and file sharing, among other things. The popularity of unified communication systems is growing rapidly, owing to the ease of operations it offers. Moreover, with work-from-home becoming a common feature with many multinational companies, unified communications systemshave become a necessity.
Businesses have been quick to adopt comprehensive unified communications systems, thus giving impetus to unified communications companies. The industry is growing at a CAGR of 12.3 %. In fact, unified communication systems have emerged as a significant category in the software-as-a-service (SaaS) industry. Communications-as-a-service (CaaS) is a collection of various software products and services over the internet, which unified communications companies offer on a license basis. So the maintenance of servers, cloud storage, connections and all back-end updating of content and services, and other administrative work is handled by these companies. So users have a seamless experience, wherein they just have to sign in to use the services.
Unified communications companies like MSG91 also cater to the specific needs of clients by modifying and customising products/services to suit their requirements. This makes it much easier for clients to manage their digital workforce and remote working situations. Given the fact thatunified communications systems leverage existing cloud systems set up bycloud communications companies, it allows companies to control capital expenditure. Therefore, unified communications is well on its way to become the mainstay of a company's communication plan, keeping it functional, efficient, comprehensive and economically feasible.
Why:
Decentralized teams
Thanks to smartphones, tablets and wireless internet technologies, work is no more restricted to a place, rather has transformed into an activity. Also, since the organization chart has grown flatter and employees need access to information directly, CaaS is the ultimate solution.
Brand consistency
While interacting with different channels, customers should get the feeling that they’re interacting with the same brand and that can be achieved only through unified communication.
The cloud-based tools can be easily integrated not only making it seamless for the team, platform and customers to communicate, but the benefits your business reaps are immense.
Benefits:
Centralized solutions and mobility lead to higher productivity
Unified communication tools allow businesses to foster better collaboration. With voicemail, email, SMS and other mobility integration in your product, your employees, management, clients, vendors, and shareholders can remain connected from any part of the world. Also, no more chances of missed voice calls, full email inboxes or other communication breakdowns as it highly reduces the risk.
Improved customer experience management
CaaS allows you to add diverse channels to communicate with your end customer. With the integrated ability, you can send SMS, email notification, voice message and more directly from your platform keeping customers timely informed. Also, unified communications tools allow transparency in customer interactions, so your representatives can always view a customer’s history and offer fitting solutions.
Targeted and meaningful recommendations
Instead of working blindly on cold leads, adding communication across the customer journey can allow you to target your audience. This simply means you can offer them meaningful recommendations based on their personal choices.
Validating authenticity to add security
Security is a cross-functional concern and you as a product-owner know how important it is, but aren’t sure how to quantify it? CaaS once again comes to the rescue with 2FA solutions that allow you to communicate with your customer validating their authenticity during the sign-up process and other crucial account transactions.
Web and teleconferencing tools reduce costs
By bundling VoIP, messaging, email, OTP, data, storage and other services, companies can definitely achieve immediate cost reduction making it no small feat. It is essential that you choose a provider well. Magneto IT Solutions is an It solutions provider that we recommend for all your IoT, e-commerce and mobile development needs.
Adding value to products and applications, CaaS platforms are already busy rolling out advanced services – click-to-call, voice blast, SMS integration, one-time password and more.
As CaaS further evolves, it is bound to unleash a wave of innovation and you as a business leader need to make sure your product is riding on this wave offering the best solutions to your customers.
