How does a Unified Communications platform benefit your business?

Technology vendors like Cisco and 8×8 develop powerful Unified Communications (UC) solutions that help businesses streamline and centralize their communications. Third-party service providers like InterVision partner with these vendors to bundle their products into a customized suite of cloud-based solutions called Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS). A UCaaS platform can benefit your business in many ways:

• It provides access to a streamlined suite of communication tools such as cloud calling, voice mail, direct messaging, web conferencing and file sharing, from a variety of devices and locations.
• It enhances communication and collaboration between employees.
• It facilitates hybrid work scenarios without compromising productivity.
• It is more cost effective than maintaining in your own system in-house.
• It simplifies your budget by giving you access to a wide range of communication tools and services with only one bill.
• It is easily customizable and flexible enough to meet the unique needs of your business.
• It is highly scalable and can grow as your business grows, adapting to volatile market conditions.

A quality service provider can tailor a unique UCaaS solution to meet the needs of small companies with limited budgets as well as global corporations with offices located around the world.

Let’s consider three examples of UCaaS and how its suite of solutions can help alleviate common pain-points that businesses have:

Cost Savings

The owner of a local engineering firm needs a new communications platform so his employees can more easily connect and collaborate with each other, both through voice calls and instant messaging. They also regularly share large files, containing blueprints and technical information, both internally and externally. And they need to occasionally host video conferences with clients and contractors.

However, the firm has a limited IT budget, and after researching various options, the owner determines that hosting a unified communications platform on-premises requires too much of an investment in the equipment and infrastructure. Moreover, his IT team does not have the bandwidth to manage and maintain such a system in-house.

So, he decides to hire a third-party service provider that can customize and host a cloud-based UCaaS platform at a lower cost. The provider would also act as the firm’s IT department by maintaining and managing all aspects of the platform for a single monthly fee.

Consolidation and Simplification

The CTO of a medical device manufacturer with a national field-based sales team wants to upgrade the company’s existing communication solutions. She needs a solution that enhances communication both for the sales teams, working remotely, and corporate employees. She also needs a more robust video conferencing tool for the monthly town hall meetings that the new CEO is planning.

Her IT team currently manages multiple communication channels that are individually paid for and maintained. The system is expensive and labor-intensive. The goal is to improve functionality and simplify management by consolidating all the various channels into a single platform for a single monthly fee.

In this scenario, the service provider advises the CTO and her IT team on the best UCaaS solution to meet their needs, and helps them migrate onto the new platform. All the various communication tools can now be easily managed from a single dashboard, which frees her IT team up to concentrate on more important projects.

Flexibility

The new Director of Operations for a regional bank with employees in branches across several states wants to migrate from the bank’s legacy phone systems to a more efficient, scalable, and cheaper UCaaS platform.

Due to contractual obligations, the bank needs to continue managing the phone system on site, but the director wants to utilize a service provider to host and manage web conferencing, file sharing and direct messaging functions on the cloud.

In this case, a flexible service provider could integrate a hybrid UCaaS model where they would host and manage some applications in the cloud while the client would manage one or more on-premises.

Service providers are problem solvers

These examples highlight the value that a good service provider can bring to your business regardless of size. For more than 25 years, InterVision has been helping businesses of all sizes solve their IT problems. We partner with world-class technology vendors like Cisco and 8×8 among others, so we can advise you about each of their products in order to tailor a customized solution that best fits your unique needs.

If you want to learn more about how UCaaS can help your business, contact us today.