Today, more and more companies are opting for remote work due to various advantages involved. These include the ability to hire the best talent pool from across the world. The other benefits include ensuring continuity of their operations and reducing their infrastructure and operation-associated costs. It is a challenge for these companies to establish smooth, efficient, and dependable communication among their team members based in different locations around the world.
Their team members and employees use different apps and systems for communication and collaboration. These include Skype, WhatsApp, Zoom, enterprise resource planning systems, customer relationship systems, project management software, etc. The usage of diverse communication apps and systems compounds this challenge and can result in various downsides.
The disadvantages can include misunderstandings and miscommunication, the creation of information silos, difficulty in tracking the team’s progress, decreased cohesion among team members, and increased work complexity. Furthermore, the use of diverse systems can lead to increased costs. This is due to costs associated with subscription or licensing and maintenance plans for using multiple communication tools and providing training to employees to use them.
Additionally, using multiple systems for communication can hamper efficient workflow and make it harder for employees to maintain a unified organizational culture. Moreover, this can give rise to more security vulnerabilities because of a greater dependence on technology.
What is the Solution?
The solution for this remote communication and collaboration challenge lies in technology. UCaaS or Unified Communications as a Service is a technology-based solution that operates through the cloud. It effectively addresses this communication and collaboration-related challenge faced by remotely working teams.
Let’s know more about UCaaS.
What is UCaaS?
Unified Communications indicates the integration of various communication and productivity-related tools into a single platform. The tools commonly used in UC platforms include instant messaging and chat, online meetings, and video conferencing. They also include file sharing and collaboration, VoIP telephony, emails, and calendar and scheduling. Moreover, unified communications involves the integration of UC tools with other business applications such as CRM software and project management software, through the use of APIs.
“As a service” refers to the delivery model used for providing cloud services and software to users.
The UCaaS system adoption enables companies to provide communication and collaboration tools to their staff to work from anywhere. UCaaS solutions can function from various devices, including smartphones, desk phones, computers, laptops, and tablets. These solutions provide ways for the workers of companies to seamlessly interact across different communication channels without requiring them to switch between them. This helps to enhance their productivity and efficiency at work and boost workplace organization.
Unified communications and collaboration help businesses gain more control over their workflows and processes and enable remote employees to stay better connected.
UCaaS has its roots in VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol), which changes sound to data packets and transmits them to a cloud phone service provider. VoIP technology utilizes the universal Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), which is a signaling protocol for voice, video, and messaging-related applications.
UCaaS enhances VoIP by integrating VoIP-based voice calls with other communication tools. Therefore, companies don’t need to build and operate analog phone lines to let every person talk to or work on projects. Moreover, due to the cloud-based nature of the UcaaS, its working remains unaffected by natural disasters.
How does UCaaS work?
UCaaS gives a unified solution to organizations that helps resolve all their communication-related problems and limitations. Therefore, they need not invest extra towards developing, configuring, and maintaining the VoIP hardware and making it secure, and maintaining its uptime. Moreover, they need not invest in hiring extra staff to perform the tasks related to the hardware’s development, management, maintenance, and security.
UC technology utilizes a single interface to manage communications. It allows teams to seamlessly switch between multiple communication channels, which can be messaging between employees, calling customers, and holding video conferencing sessions with various stakeholders. Rather than requiring multiple platforms or providers for accessing and using different services, UCaaS streamlines multiple communication tools used by businesses every day and integrates them into a single platform. This results in improved organizational collaboration and productivity.
As UCaaS functions through the web, employees can get access to various communication tools from any device and at any time. This enables employees to work in an efficient manner. Moreover, they can remain connected with each other from their respective locations, which can be the office, home, or during travel.
The UCaaS solution provider is responsible for ensuring cloud-based communication services are fully managed. Therefore, you need not worry about building and managing your company’s communications infrastructure yourself.
The UCaaS solution development, configuration, management, and maintenance is handled by the solution provider itself, while you can simply focus on using the solution for your business communication.
The Essential Functions of UCaaS
These are various key functions performed by UCaaS.
Voice
The phone service offered by UCaaS includes call forwarding, call recording, and advanced call routing.
Video
It facilitates one-to-one and multi-participant video conferencing for meetings for personalized interactions. Guests are allowed to join through web conferencing.
Messaging
Internal team instant messaging enables individual and group-based real-time chat.
Collaboration
Tools enhance workplace-related collaboration through the use of calendars, scheduling, file sharing, messaging, and project management.
Cloud-based
UCaaS is hosted on the internet in a secure data center or a dedicated, privately operated cloud.
UCaaS simplifies technical telephony tasks. As an example, the call routing of incoming calls can be changed with just a few clicks. Ease of use and simplification are the reasons behind the ever-growing usage of unified communications solutions in the business world.
How can UCaaS help remotely based teams?
Voice and Telephony
UCaaS systems are equipped with various high-quality voice services and features. These include high-quality audio, intelligent call routing, call recording, etc. Their use enables remote employees to enhance their productivity at work. These voice-related services and features are particularly useful for customer-facing teams.
Instant Messaging
The use of messaging in real-time conversations and asynchronous chats enables effortless and convenient collaboration between remote teams. Moreover, messaging provides organizations with an excellent way to convert leads coming to their website or social media accounts. It also lets customers conveniently interact with your company.
Moreover, a UCaaS platform enables the creation of dedicated rooms for any topic or project, which helps keep communication organized and facilitates the exchange of files among team members.
Video Conferencing
Video conferencing solutions or meetings provided by UCaaS enable face-to-face virtual communication between remote teams. The solutions make it easier for teammates to collaborate irrespective of their respective work locations. When it comes to delivering internal or client pitches or sharing presentations, video conferencing helps to make them more personable.
Tracking and Availability
While it is easier to make out who is available for communication in a physical office setting, determining employees’ availability can be difficult in remote work settings.
Employees can put up correct statuses such as busy, available, offline, out for lunch, signed off for the day, etc., on the instant messaging channels being used by them. Therefore, your team members can connect with you at a time convenient to you. Using status indicators on instant messaging channels leads to more effective communication. This also results in decreased disruptions and efficient collaboration. This eventually betters the overall organization at the workplace and boosts team productivity. Moreover, this helps employees remove distractions and achieve work-life balance.
Mobility
Remotely based workers on the move need the ability to log in to their devices to work from any location. A UCaaS solution gives teams the freedom to work from their tablets and mobile phones from anywhere, whenever required. As all the tools can be accessed through the cloud, employees don’t need to download heavy software on their devices.
Benefits of UCaaS adoption:-
Let’s now talk about various benefits granted by UCaaS solutions.
Enhanced Customer Service
Customers’ experience can be affected due to connectivity-related issues between teams and end-customers. With the help of UCaaS solutions, you can establish excellent connectivity at each point during the customer journey. Monitoring and tracking systems, such as call recordings, help you optimize your customers’ experience and identify any issues in your customer flow. Irrespective of the communication channel being used by your customers like phone, email, messaging, or social media, UCaaS enables you to streamline your customers’ experience
Decreased Costs
Businesses making a switch to UCaaS, a cloud-based communications system, can save a significant amount of costs. This is because they don’t need to pay vendors for service contracts for installation, licensing fees, and initial consultation for phone systems, hardware, and more offered by them. These savings increase exponentially over time. Moreover, you don’t need to pay extra for using various systems separately, like SMS, ticketing/helpdesk, video conferencing, and telephony. You can use all these systems as a part of your UCaaS solution, for which you have to pay one simplified bill.
Due to the remote nature of their work, business organizations don’t need to pay for the creation of office space and providing associated utilities like electricity, etc. This also saves costs for the involved organizations. Therefore, UCaaS is less expensive than your existing phone system and provides you more value than it.
Consolidation of Tools
Your company may use separate communication tools depending on the needs of your different teams. For example, your customer service may require telephony and call recording. Your sales teams may need a CRM pipeline. Your product team may require instant messaging and collaboration tools. With UCaaS, the communication and connectivity needs of your various teams are effectively addressed with one single comprehensive solution. It lets you achieve centralized communication and collaboration management.
Scalability
UCaaS is pretty useful for businesses that are expanding. It enables businesses of all sizes, including enterprises and small businesses, to scale up their infrastructure faster without additional costs. To use UCaaS, you don’t require on-site servers, private telephone lines, or equipment. You only need an internet connection to start using it. You can scale up operations in any country of the world without requiring the setting up of the infrastructure at the location.
Apart from simplifying onboarding, UCaaS solutions also make it easy for you to add new users with the growth of your team grows. They use the newest technology to improve business processes and update automatically with new apps, tools, and security features. UCaaS systems let you expand your workforce and keep them connected with minimal tech resources. They can work as one team, and you can manage the team even if its members are located in different locations.
Enhanced Productivity
Employees don’t need to work across several platforms. Everything they require for work is available at a centralized location, which helps enhance project management and workflow efficiency. This also enables teams to move faster and achieve better quality at work.
Flexibility
Due to access to various communication tools in one platform, UCaaS enables businesses to quickly respond and adjust to changes. Moreover, it enables them to respond faster to customer needs. UCaaS also lets employees work flexibly from any location, such as the office, home, or while traveling, from any device with a reliable internet connection.
Maintaining Security
When teams work remotely, the probability of data leaks increases, and the security of networked devices becomes a concern. Data compromises can increase costs exorbitantly for businesses, affect the running of their operations, and erode trust placed by customers in their business. To prevent data breaches and illegal access, safeguard the data of customers, and maintain business continuity, UCaaS solutions utilize encrypted channels. Users are allowed to view their call recordings and past messages to recognize any suspicious activity. Thus, businesses can act proactively to counter activities that can compromise their data and system security.
These benefits prove the usefulness of UCaaS for remote communication and collaboration among business teams. Latest technologies, such as AI and machine learning, are helping to make UCaaS systems more useful for business organizations. Let’s see how.
How AI is enhancing the capabilities of UCaaS Systems?
The advanced artificial intelligence capabilities of UCaaS systems help improve workflows by enabling automation of processes. Moreover, their speech-to-text capabilities help to improve accessibility. Additionally, the AI capabilities improve work efficiency by enabling intelligent scheduling and recommendations. Furthermore, the AI capabilities can contribute to boosting user experience.
Here are some groundbreaking AI features that are enabling UCaaS systems to become more powerful, useful, and capable.
Real-Time Transcriptions and Translations
The providers of UCaaS software development solutions are leveraging AI to offer real-time transcriptions and translations. This ensures documents, video conferences, and chat talks can be accessed and comprehended immediately by all participants in any supported language.
Digital Assistants for Workflow Automation
Generative artificial intelligence can be used for the creation of digital assistants that automate and manage complex workflows. They can streamline tasks like automatically scheduling appointments by analyzing patterns in the user preferences and client request-related data. Digital assistants can accordingly find suitable time slots and send confirmations to customers. They can also manage any changes and adapt to provide personalized user experiences.
Content and Idea Generation
AI’s ability to access an extensive amount of user data can be utilized for generating content and ideas in platforms that are integrable with productivity suites. It can be applied for the creation of presentations and reports, and brainstorming sessions.
Intelligent Meetings
Artificial intelligence facilitates intelligent meetings with these features.
Meeting recaps
Based on the role of the participant, AI can create comprehensive and customized summaries of calls and meetings that put emphasis on specific decisions and tasks. Moreover, AI can help create tailored task lists according to the role of the participant. The creation of tailored summaries and meetings helps reduce the chance of errors and saves time.
Chapters for meeting recordings
AI performs segmentation of meeting recordings into easily navigable chapters.
Sentiment Analysis
AI evaluates and interprets the sentiments and emotional aspects in the gathered spoken or written data, such as reviews, social media posts, and other feedback. As a result, sentiments can be classified as positive, negative, or neutral. AI can accordingly offer the required responsive action to be performed for enhancing customer satisfaction and boosting team morale.
Intelligent Call Routing
AI can analyze the intent or query state of customers in real-time. It can accordingly direct the customer to the best available agent or department with the required performance and capabilities to answer the customer’s query. This reduces wait times for customers, improves their satisfaction levels, and turns their experience into a better one.
Predictive Communication Insights
Based on the analysis of customers’ historical data, patterns, and trends, AI can foresee situations associated with delays in the working processes, communication bottlenecks. or missed deadlines. As these situations can become critical after some time, businesses can take preemptive action to resolve them early. This consequently prevents escalation of situations.
Inclusion of these advanced AI-enabled capabilities and features helps to make UCaaS platforms more robust and useful. Moreover, they are considerably improving the way enterprises and other business organizations communicate and collaborate. Additionally, the features are helping businesses better their efficiency, decision-making, and customer experience, and grow on a global basis.
By now, you have gained useful knowledge about various aspects of UCaaS systems. These include what these systems are, how they work, their essential functions, how they can help remote teams, and their benefits. and how AI elevates the capabilities of UCaaS systems.
This valuable knowledge may have inspired you to opt for ucaas solution development. Therefore, you now need to know the best practices for building a custom UCaaS solution for your business organization. Following these best practices will help to make your organization’s transition to the UCaaS solution smoother and successful, besides ensuring business continuity.
Best Practices to Move to UCaaS
- Audit Your Existing Communication Tools
At the time of transitioning from a legacy communications system to a UCaaS system, it is important to identify all the existing tools your employees are using for communication across teams and departments. Moreover, you need to understand how they communicate in the real world. Furthermore, you need to examine how each department operates.
You may come to know that your employees in different departments use different tools for communication and collaboration. While some may rely on the use of CRM, others may use web conferencing. This may also enable you to find particular tools that overlap or identify particular features that your employees do not use at all.
This tech stack will help you make informed decisions while moving to a new UCaaS solution.
- Assess Your Needs
It is critical to know in this assessment period what your core functions are, which particular features you need, and where your current gaps lie. This helps you avoid those features from a UCaaS solution provider that you don’t require. The provider may offer ways to tailor certain features to your business needs. You can also utilize the assessment period to obtain feedback from team members and learn where workflows could be enhanced.
- Perform Documentation
Documenting your processes for managing your UCaaS solution is important to maintain your business continuity. Therefore, you need to thoroughly and carefully consider auto attendants, call flows, and other enterprise communication needs. Moreover, you can write down any important phone numbers of concerned people that you may need for seeking help.
Documentation will help you prepare for any unexpected situations that are not favourable for your business.
- Inform Your Team and Give a Transition Timeline
As your organization upgrades to a UCaaS system, you have to make sure that your team is aware of the timeline for the switch. It will either be a phased roll-out or an immediate transition. Outline the project’s timeline and include the highlights of things to expect. Keeping your team in the know helps ensure they have adequate time to document processes. Moreover, this helps keep disruption of business processes to a minimum.
Your UCaaS provider should collaborate with you to ensure minimal downtime with the implementation of the UCaaS system at your business. He should provide resource guides to both your on-site and remote employees to improve their user experience while using the newly adopted UCaaS system.
You can involve end-users in the implementation process early through pilot programs offered by the solution provider. While implementing programs, they will test the new system and ensure it meets their needs. A phased rollout allows you to gather feedback along the way.
Imparting training to end-users ensures that they have an understanding of all the features and capabilities of the newly adopted UCaaS platform. The UCAAS solution provider may develop and organize on-site or web-based user adoption and training programs for your team. The training should not only emphasize how to use the new platform, but also how it can streamline and enhance your workflows and business processes.
Support, learning resources, and training programs offered by the provider help to reduce the learning curve of your team members as your business switches to the UCaaS communication system. Moreover, they will help to make your UCaaS system adoption process smoother.
How to Find the Right Unified Communications Solution Provider
Investing in a new UCaaS platform certainly provides many advantages to both new and established businesses. Businesses may face the challenge of how to compare various UcaaS solution providers to choose the right provider as per their business needs. Evaluating them by considering the following criteria will make it easy for you to choose the best unified communications solution provider right fit for your business needs.
- Features They Offer
It is worth having a look at the providers’ feature stack and how it has evolved. Ensure that the solution meets all your requirements. Alternatively, the providers should be able to deliver other ad hoc solutions if you need them. Make sure that the solution being offered has all the features you need.
- Customer Service
During the implementation of the new UCaaS system at your company, you may encounter issues that need to be troubleshooted. Therefore, you require help from the UC provider to resolve the issues. Keeping this in view, you need to know what kind of help is available with the provider to resolve any issues being faced by you. The type of help and support offered by the provider is an important consideration while finding the best unified communications provider for your needs.
The answer to these questions will help you decide whether the provider is worth going with or not. Is live chat or phone support always available with the UCaaS solution provider? Will he provide assistance during the initial implementation or migration of Unified Communications? Does the provider provide team onboarding or continued training programs?
- Security
As your remote and hybrid employees work on different devices and networks, you will have to consider whether your UCaaS system provider provides comprehensive security features. Before you decide to invest in a particular UCaaS solution provider, make it a point to speak with their representative. Ask him whether the provider’s infrastructure is equipped with data encryption, threat management, and access permissions and controls for enhanced UCaaS system security.
- Reliability
While comparing various unified communications solution providers, consider their uptime history. Alternatively, you can seek documentation about the reliability performance of the provider. Uptime percentage should be above 99%. You can evaluate the UC provider’s social media pages to check if there is a history or pattern of outages. You can accordingly decide whether to choose a particular UCaaS solution provider or not.
- Consistent User Experience
A Unified Communications as a Service system makes it easier for employees to work across various devices. For this reason, a consistent UI and UX of the system is crucial. This helps save employees’ time and lets them easily manage and navigate the communication tools they use on an everyday basis. Moreover, it makes it easier for the IT department to deliver support when required.
- Scalability
Scalability is yet another important consideration at the time of evaluating a UCaaS software solution provider. Therefore, you need to check if the provider’s solution is able to scale up or down quickly and whether the offered solution has on-demand call center capabilities. Moreover, you need to clarify if the provider has multiple data centers in different geographical locations to effectively cater to its customers’ needs.
Focusing on these points while evaluating various UCaaS solution providers will help you choose the right provider that you can trust for your UCaaS software development project’s success.
Once you have chosen and hired the ideal solution provider for your UCaaS solution development needs, the provider will take charge of your development project. He will perform the steps to build the desired tailored UCaaS solution for your business.
Steps for Custom Ucaas Software Development
- Needs Assessment and Discovery
Understand Business Goals
At this stage, the UCaaS solution provider works with you (the client) to discuss and identify various communication pain points currently being faced by your business organization. The points can be in terms of streamlining tools, supporting remote work, or enhancing customer experience.
Define Requirements
The provider gets clarity and defines particular features that are essential for your organization. These features can be video, voice, messaging, analytics, and integrations with your existing software systems like CRMs or ERPs.
- Solution Design and Platform Selection
Platform Customization
Based on the assessment of your organization’s needs, the provider will design a customized solution for you. This includes selecting the required features, applications, and UCaaS platform components.
Feature Focus
Important areas are considered for your UCaaS solution development at this stage. These include reliability of the solution, for example, 99% uptime. Maintaining robust security through encryption and compliance is another significant focus area. Yet another key area for focus is comprehensive tools for collaboration.
Integration Planning
The design of the UCaaS platform includes how it will integrate with business tools being presently used by your organization for creating seamless workflows.
3. Network and Infrastructure Preparation
Network Assessment
The UcaaS solution provider ensures that your (client’s) infrastructure, which also includes bandwidth, is able to support the new UCaaS solution to maintain the quality of communication.
Security Measures
The provider implements essential security protocols and measures for protecting the new system against potential threats and risks.
- Deployment Strategy and Planning
Deployment Plan
The provider forms a clear strategy with defined responsibilities, milestones, and timelines for the solution’s implementation process.
Phased or Immediate Rollout
The plan determines whether the solution’s implementation will be done in phases or if it will be implemented as an immediate transition to reduce disruption of your business.
- Implementation and Integration
Physical Installation
If required, the provider’s technicians perform the installation of necessary hardware and desktop or mobile apps for your end-users.
Software Integration
Here, the provider’s technicians perform integration of the UCaaS platform with business systems being presently used by your organization. These systems can be email, CRM, ERP, and project management tools.
Onboarding and Training: The UCaaS solution provider provides necessary training and support for onboarding your employees in the use of the new UCaaS system. This includes providing learning resources for ensuring smooth adoption of the system among your employees and making them comfortable in the use of the new system.
- Monitoring and Optimization
Performance Tracking
After your UCaaS system’s successful deployment in your network infrastructure, the provider tracks its performance. Moreover, he obtains feedback from users on it.
Continuous Solution Improvement
According to the performance-centered data and users’ feedback, the solution is further enhanced and optimized. This ensures it consistently meets your business needs.
Adopt the Future of Business Communication Technology
By now, you have gained knowledge about the usefulness of cutting-edge UCaaS technology-based solutions in addressing the communication challenges being faced by your remotely based teams, as they use multiple tools and apps for communication. Moreover, you have gained valuable insights about various aspects related to these solutions. These include their functions, features, benefits, best practices for UCaaS solution development, how to choose the right UCaaS solution provider, and steps for their development.
This knowledge will help you make the decision in favour of adopting the UCaaS system solution to make your organization’s communication and collaboration streamlined, efficient, and secure and to achieve various associated gains. These include increased productivity, enhanced customer experience and satisfaction, slashed costs, and more.
To make your UCAAS software development and implementation smooth and successful, you need to partner with a specialist and trusted UCAAS software System development company like Capanicus. Having necessary technological expertise and experience in the field of UCaaS software development, the company has built advanced UCaaS solutions for businesses of diverse sizes and industries. This makes our company the right choice for navigating your UCaaS development project to success.
Begin your UCaas development journey today with us by reaching out to our experts for your business needs.
