Communication is paramount in any business. Effective communication makes every part of your organisation run more smoothly, to the benefit of your team and customers alike. Conversely, poor communication can lead to missed deadlines and unanswered customer queries.
You need the right tools to ensure this doesn’t happen – especially in the age of remote and hybrid working. This is where our unified communications services come in.
What are unified communications?
Unified Communications (UC) may seem vague, but the concept is pretty straightforward. It simply takes all of your enterprise channels of communication and places them in one platform. This means voice and video calls, conferencing and instant messaging are in one place. There will be many other features on top, but those are the basics.
It’s essentially an upgrade on the traditional phone system. Instead of just voice calls, you get full multi-channel communication from a single tool. And better still, it’s all hosted on the cloud, so your team can access it from anywhere. This speeds up both internal and external communications in all sorts of ways.
Here at BDR, we’re one of the UK’s leading specialists in business communication tools. We’ve supplied UC solutions for businesses of all sizes, powering their productivity. Let’s look at the benefits to explain how UC can help your business.
Boosting productivity
From an operational point of view, unified communications will save heaps of time and energy. Workers can focus on the substance of their work without having to sweat the small stuff. That’s partly because you’re not constantly flicking between screens and tabs for different communication channels. But also, you’ll always know when your colleagues are available and when they’re not. That’s because each user has a presence setting, showing their current status. You can then choose the communication channel that fits.
You can also integrate with your Outlook calendar, so booking and attending video calls is a breeze. UC makes everyday communication faster and easier.
Driving short and long-distance collaboration
More and more businesses are promoting hybrid and flexible working patterns, bringing a heightened demand for modern ways to collaborate and share work. UC ensures that workers can always be in touch when on the move. Thanks to cloud hosting, you can use it from anywhere with an internet connection. This means anyone working at home or on the road has the same tools as your team in the office.
Better long-distance collaboration is great for multi-site businesses too. Cloud-based systems can be accessed from anywhere. This means one UC solution can cover all your sites.
A dream for flexible and remote workers
Ease of access, communication and sharing of data and work were three key requirements of remote working over the COVID-19 pandemic. It also seems like these working patterns are here to stay. Many companies have kept flexible working in place, and many are also coming around to the idea.
A centralised UC system means that workers can access their work from anywhere. All they have to do is sign in and access whatever tools they require.
Making work life easy
It’s a simple but worthy factor; unified communication makes your workers’ lives easier. No more wandering down to the ground floor to ask your colleague about a simple administration-related query. No more having to move your desk as all of your work is saved on that desktop. No more missed calls. UC manages all of that.
If you are happy and familiar with working from your smartphone or laptop, you’ll find unified communications to be a real treat. It’s a key benefit and de-stress factor that you can work from the devices that you are most comfortable with.
Future-proof internet services
In 2025, there’s big change on its way. If your telephone system is still using the PSTN or ISDN legacy lines, they won’t be for much longer. In 2015 BT announced they would switch all of the legacy lines off by 2025, forcing the UK to switch to internet-based telephone calls.
Moving to a UC service with VoIP calls will provide better voice quality as well as future-proofing your business.
Reducing costs
UC can save on costs in all sorts of ways. For one, there’s minimal capital investment as it’s a subscription service. Deployment and maintenance are also faster, and often less expensive as a result. In addition, IP phone calls tend to be much better value.
If you need to scale- up due to a recruitment drive or adding a new site, this is also easy. Adding new users is quick and simple, and can mostly be done remotely. Meanwhile, the increased efficiency ultimately saves on operating costs too. In short, UC’s flexibility and versatility can save all sorts of costs.
Why choose BDR Group?
We’ve provided unified communications services to businesses of all shapes and sizes, from start-ups to large scale enterprises.
Service is at the heart of everything we do. We work closely with you, to ensure all you IT and communication needs are met.
If your business is looking toward the future and revolutionising the way your teams work, get in touch with us. Speak to one of our members on 0800 975 3000.
