Today’s customers increasingly expect live and real-time communication. A unified communications (UC) solution can help make this possible by integrating audio, video and mobile capabilities that enable a new level of customer service.

With unified communications for business, customers can initiate a video chat with a service representative from any location, at any time. And with mobile apps, calls can be handled remotely. The result: agents are more productive because they can handle calls wherever they are.

Applications such as live chat, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software and help desk solutions have already been implemented by many companies. Although these separate systems, applications and technologies are resulting in a better customer experience, they sometimes create barriers between departments. It’s very important to connect these silos to allow business processes to run smoothly and take customer service to the next level.

Unified communications systems (UCS) are therefore essential for business success. They allow you to connect with all parts of your business and serve your customers better.

Key Components of Unified Communications

Voice and VoIP

Cloud phone systems allow you to use your devices to make and receive phone calls with the help of a web application, a server and your phone. The web application provides a user friendly interface that allows you to administer your system, manage calls, and check your call logs. The ability to access voice logs from anywhere makes the cloud phone systems more convenient than using a conventional telephone line.

Voice over internet protocol (VoIP) allows digital information to travel via the internet as opposed to travelling through traditional phone lines. The main advantage of using VoIP is reduced cost. VoIP enables businesses to save as much as 60 percent of their telephone costs. Businesses can make unlimited calls to any location with an internet connection – with no need for a phone line.

Video Conferencing

Globally, video adoption has soared in recent months as organizations established work-from-home policies amid the pandemic. Video conferencing allows your remote workforce to join conferences via laptop, tablet or smartphone. Video also improves communications with teams on the road without slowing them down.

Messaging

Messaging is a feature that is undergoing massive change. While it used to be separate from other UC features, messaging is now more dynamic and integrated with other workflows. ​Users can manage multiple types of messages using unified messaging and switch communication modes as needed. Conversations between a customer service representative and a customer is unified on the same instant messaging platform and customers are able to speak with representatives using their preferred method, whether through SMS, Twitter DM, Facebook Messenger or a phone call.

Business Email

Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) allows you to host your email on external servers. Your employees have access to all the communication tools they need with a simple internet connection. This allows you to search through all mailboxes within your company if necessary, and lets you create shared mailboxes for users. These new business email solutions allow you to have the same e-mail account on different devices: desktop, smartphone or tablet. It works perfectly whether your employees are in the office, mobile on the go, or in front of their computers at home.

Presence

Presence is a feature that allows users to see the availability of colleagues by means of status indicators (such as online, offline, busy and out of the office). It is used by desktop, mobile and UC solutions across the industry to enable efficient collaboration and communication. Presence is a very useful feature for those who work in a distributed environment in which there are no set hours or in which employees often participate in meetings that require them to be always available. Presence functionality is provided by Session Initiation Protocol (SIP).

File Sharing

File sharing is one of the most common needs of everyday business life. Simultaneously working on multiple tasks, communicating with different people at a time and completing projects – all this can be difficult without sufficient file sharing. Collaboration solutions allow for the sharing of documents and projects between teams regardless of where they may be located. These tools enable communication to continue seamlessly, even when it is not possible to reach each other remotely.

Screen Sharing

Screen sharing is the ability for one person to see or even take control of another computer. You can see the other person’s computer screen, or even use it just like you would if you were sitting at it. That means you can see another person’s emails, spreadsheets, files, photos or anything else that’s on the screen. Screen sharing also allows meeting attendees to share their screens in real-time during meetings, both internally and externally. This improves collaboration and speeds up decision making.

Unified Communications and Collaboration (UC&C) is helping companies transition to a more modern workplace while reducing costs, improving employee productivity and bringing more customers. Unified Communications platforms also give customers more ways to interact with you: phone, video, SMS and online chat for collaboration with your team if needed. Whatever your customer’s preferences, they’ll feel comfortable interacting with you, and more likely to become happy, loyal customers.

Nick Dicksee, CPaaS Specialist Lead at Avaya UK&I, explains how organisations can catapult themselves into the future of work with a simple and powerful framework designed to aid Total Experience.

Over the past year, the focus on Unified Communications has shifted from an area of increased interest to a necessity for business continuity.

While many organisations quickly adopted the technologies and applications required for basic remote working, it has taken a little longer for all of us to work out exactly how to truly enable a remote workforce.

The need for action on this is pressing. According to the Life and Work Beyond 2020 study, commissioned by Avaya, those who reported being happier in 2020 than in 2019 identified working from home as a key driver of that happiness. And nearly half (46%) prefer to work remotely or at least be given the option and tools to do. Conversely, 52% worry about going back to a fully in-office workday.

Avaya believes it can help organisations not only address the challenges of this new work-from-anywhere world, but actually come out of it better than ever. To see what its technology approach means for the future of work, and how it can help organisations address these trends, we spoke to Nick Dicksee, CPaaS Specialist Lead at Avaya UK&I.

What have organisations learned about UC over the past year?

The pandemic has advanced years of developing a work-from-anywhere culture into mere months but trying to adopt a ‘business as usual’ approach by just remote-enabling employees with a bunch of apps has proven to not be enough.

For example, one of the biggest issues that organisations report is employees struggling with the fatigue of managing too many separate apps. They’re constantly switching between their video conferencing, their messaging, their email, their task management, and more. All while figuring out new ways to do business. This isn’t sustainable, particularly since it’s clear that work-from-anywhere is here to stay.

How do organisations address that specific point around app overload?

This is why we have seen the rise of workstream collaboration, which replaces disparate communications tools with easy-to-navigate virtual workspaces built with today’s distributed work environment in mind.

It’s very exciting in that it’s driving a new conversation around remote employee and customer engagement.

How do workstream collaboration solutions differ from, say, a regular video conferencing solution?

I can’t speak to other solutions on the market, but I can certainly say that it’s what’s under the hood of our platform, Avaya Spaces, that sets it apart. We’ve leveraged the powerful framework of Avaya OneCloud CPaaS to enhance and simplify Avaya Spaces. This means we can provide sophisticated workstream collaboration capabilities within a unified, integrated, all-in-one solution, with zero business disruption. And because it’s built on CPaaS, it can help organisations to transform legacy communications into the new future of work.

Talk us through what exactly CPaaS is.

CPaaS is in the driver’s seat of the composable-enterprise vision. Organisations today are looking at Total Experience strategies, which reimagine customer and employee journeys to the point that any experience across any touchpoint is effortless. These strategies are made up of a myriad of composable solutions, which address specific use cases and experiences.

Take a look at Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS), which delivers best-of-breed building blocks in the area of employee experience and work automation. And then look at Contact centre as a Service (CCaaS), which enables the creation of unforgettable multiexperiences for customers.

CPaaS is the facilitator for both these offerings – it’s the force multiplier that can truly enable a Total Experience strategy across the enterprise. It enables organisations to rapidly innovate to address a wide range of use cases. It catalyses the pace of innovation while working with monolithic on-premises or cloud communications infrastructure. It connects them with the latest API-driven cloud-based capabilities, that they can then use to compose new experiences.

What does the rise of CPaaS-enabled workstream collaboration mean for the future of work? What else is possible?

Forget about the future – we’re already enabling AI in the cloud through our CPaaS solutions. For example, going back to Avaya Spaces, we can quickly spool-up features like AI-powered background replacement and noise elimination. We can create virtual work environments, so it looks like workers are in an office or briefing centre and, at the same time, eliminate distractions like barking dogs.

And this is just the start. Going forward, AI will enable virtual cosmetics or fixing poor lighting and camera haze, for example. Presentations will be enhanced with AI for more engaging meeting experiences.

Cloud-driven AI could take on the form of a digital co-worker to help get work done. Searchable AI transcriptions will differentiate voices, producing accurate real-time closed captions and translation, generate meeting minutes, identify and create tasks from within meetings or conversation streams and list them for you and your team. Richer voice commands will be available, while anticipatory searching across multiple data sources will prioritise results based on activity. And if the AI is cloud-based, and not reliant on processing power in the device, it will work on nearly anything – old or new.

That’s all enabled through a framework like Avaya’s CPaaS platform.

About the Author

Nick Dicksee is CPaaS Specialist Lead at Avaya UK&I.