How To Choose A UCaaS Platform for Your Business
The shape of the office as we know it has always been determined by the need to be at the cutting edge of communications, and this has been the case since the very beginning of office-based professions.
This evolution predates even the telephone, as the rise of industry beyond the previous scope of the family business meant that desks and furniture were required to store and organize the vast quantities of correspondence, orders, and financial bookkeeping information.
Since then, offices have been designed around the primary communications and administrative functions of their eras, from letters and telephones to modern hotdesking with laptops and enterprise smartphones allowing work to be undertaken from anywhere. No matter what the era, workers have needed to keep in touch with each other, to collaborate, and to share information, and the way they have done that has evolved with the technology available at the time. Enter the era of unified communications.
Unified Communications (UC) refers to a technology and a set of communication tools and solutions that integrate various forms of communication and collaboration, such as voice calls, video calls, instant messaging, email, presence information, file sharing, and more, into a single, cohesive platform. UC aims to streamline communication workflows, enhance productivity, and improve collaboration across different devices and communication channels, both within and outside of an organization.
This has made choosing the right unified communications platform essential to ensure that employees, contract workers and freelancers can collaborate with each other no matter how far apart they are or what equipment they use, so long as they are able to access a compatible platform.
Businesses have been encouraged to move towards unified communications for at least a decade as the technology has become more affordable, but in 2020 that recommendation became an absolute necessity, as companies shifted rapidly towards new ways of working.
In the present day, those acute circumstances have changed, but the need for a UC platform has not. With greater knowledge and a wider range of solutions, deciding on the right UC solution is more complex than it has been before.
What Does a UCaaS Platform Do?
The concept of Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) is the concept of bringing together all of the different communications platforms your business uses on a day-to-day basis.Most companies that have weathered the last few years will use a wide variety of communications platforms and services as and when they need them.
They may use a mix of Slack for team management, Zoom for video conferencing, Microsoft Outlook for emails, one of several IP telephone solutions, a cloud storage system and a range of different tools for developing and producing marketing correspondence such as MailChimp.
A unified communications platform would create an integrated communications platform tailored to the needs of the business that can be used and accessed anywhere in the world without compromising security while combining all of these different functions under one solution.
Typically there are five main aspects to a UCaaS product offering, although in practice these can vary based on the needs of an individual business:
- Voice, including both traditional and VoIP telecommunications, including redirecting office calls to mobile employees
- Video, which is primarily related to teleconferencing but also includes individual video calls and collaboration
- Messaging, particularly in relation to teams and groups
- Collaboration, particularly in the form of project management tools, work tracking, and the ability to manage access to read and edit documents
- The cloud, which naturally includes cloud storage and cloud applications such as office application suites, which are hosted virtually instead of in an on premise solution
These will vary significantly depending on the particular needs of the business and are often set up and maintained on a client-by-client basis.
Why Do You Need a Unified Communications Solution For Your Business?
There will be businesses that have cobbled together a makeshift suite of communications apps that may ask the question of why they need a specific unified solution, given that transitioning could potentially cause disruption as files are securely transferred from one cloud to another and employees must learn yet another system for communication and collaboration.
There are a lot of reasons why the answer is a simple and emphatic “yes”, and 84% of organizations agree that it will drive a growth in businesses that use them, according to TechRepublic.
There are three that hold particular weight and help to drive growth, lower expenses and boost profits.
The first is the most simple and important part: a unified service improves productivity in all areas of the business that rely on communications.
This improvement can be seen from the very first day a new employee works at your business, as the onboarding process is far more streamlined, simplified and easy to manage, reducing the wait times for login information and access to resources.
It also makes online onboarding far more straightforward, as the focus is on setting up a new user with access to secure communications and cloud resources that are all available in one place.
Rather than collaborative efforts primarily consisting of emails being sent back and forth or meetings that eat into production time, a collaborative platform allows for an employee or freelancer to be given access to only the files and documents they need, communicate and feedback directly on the document and avoid the issues of insufficient version control.
These benefits have significant value in their own right and save a lot of money, but it also goes without saying that a collaborative platform will almost always be cheaper than buying all of the individual services à la carte.
What Should You Look For in a UCaaS Platform?
Choosing the right UCaaS platform has become substantially trickier in recent years, albeit for positive reasons.
As cloud services have improved and matured as an industry, there have been a growing number of UCaaS offerings on the market, so the difficulty is finding the one that is best for your business.
Whilst there are a lot of small areas and unique selling points between the many different UCaaS platforms available, ultimately, there are three main areas that every business should consider when looking into different unified solutions.
The first and least negotiable element is that it needs to easily integrate into your company’s current workflow, including current software packages and services to create a wide-reaching integrated work platform that can be used to do anything you need to do.
This easy integration should also include easy installation. The less time lost acclimatizing to a new system, the better.
The second aspect, and often the reason to switch to a unified solution in the first place, is the security benefits that come from a unified solution.
The more disparate services that a company uses, the more likely it is that users will have to rely on less secure means to transmit information, and a unified platform is easier to manage permissions on.
Finally, there are the architectural considerations to take into account. Ultimately, even the most feature-rich system is going to be found wanting if it does not fully allow every employee to do what they need within the unified system.
This was a problem with some platforms designed with a particular business sector in mind such as software development, as the feature set and integrations did not factor in administration, marketing, sales and other workflows that do not fit a software development pipeline.
How To Choose The Right UCaaS Platform
Ultimately, the best UCaaS platform will be determined by a range of different factors, and while there are three critical factors that cannot be ignored and must be discussed with any potential technology partner, here are some ways to choose the best platform for your needs.
First of all, assess the needs of your business from top to bottom, discussing the change with every department. Look at what you currently use, the positives and negatives of the current system, and create a list of must-have and nice-to-have features for each arm of your business.
Next, evaluate the feature set of each potential platform, and ensure that it ticks as many boxes as possible. Ensure that on balance, it is better than your current way of working and gives you the capacity to do more.
Alongside this, consider the potential for scalability. Small businesses are likely to grow and larger businesses may restructure, so having a system that can expand to fit those needs is key, especially as the business world rapidly shifts as technology advances.
It is vital to check the security features, such as account control, authentication and validating requests. It should be as easy as possible for all users to be secure, so evaluating the security offering will also be about ensuring there are no reasons not to be secure.
A related aspect of this is ensuring a robust and easy user experience. It should be easy to use and fully featured on all supported devices. The path of least resistance should be the best possible option.
Finally, there is the cost to consider, both in terms of the installation and monthly service charges, as well as the availability of support from the service provider, third-party support and the different tier levels of support available.
There should be a clear baseline of support from your cloud service provider and easy access to support and customer service representatives, but also clarity about what extended and bespoke support is offered and the costs involved.
Ultimately, all of these questions will be easy for a service representative to provide, so feel free to ask anything you need to in order to feel assured that it is the right platform for you.
Spectralink enterprise mobility solutions integrate with all leading UC platforms, ensuring that your deskless workforce can stay connected from wherever they work within the four walls.