Customer queries about unified communications multiplied when the first states issued stay-at-home orders in response to the Covid pandemic. Remote work was already trending up before Covid, but the stay-at-home orders caused drastic disruptions and permanent changes to businesses.
Your employees and customers now require multiple communication channels to stay connected from anywhere on any device. UCaaS (Unified Communications as a Service) platforms provide this connectivity by bringing call, chat, video conferencing, file sharing, and more together into a single user interface and experience.
If your business hasn’t made the move to cloud-based UCaaS yet, now is the time. Here are five crucial reasons why you should consider UCaaS.
- Slash your overhead
Data from the University of California Santa Cruz shows nearly 317,000 businesses closed between February 2020 and September 2020. That is about 1,500 closures a day. The fact is, businesses of all sizes are struggling with the economic impact of the pandemic, but margins are tighter for SMBs.Our cloud-based SMB UCaaS systems can save you money. Traditional on-premises telecommunications systems for SMBs end up costing 56% more than cloud-based UC systems. That can mean huge saving for your business.
- Stay connected
The reality is that work-from-anywhere has been adopted by many large companies, and employees are demanding that this mode of work continues. Therefore, you need to empower your staff to work from almost anywhere.It is clear is that time spent in-office is decreasing. If your SMB previously relied on phones sitting on-site, you can save money with SMB UCaaS as mentioned above. Also, and just as valuable, UCaaS includes app-based tools that extend your business communications across devices. These tools put the work-from-anywhere policy in reach for your business, and will make it is easier to attract and retain the talent that makes your business a success and your customers happy.
- Improve your communication
UCaaS also enables your businesses to add SMS to your communications platform with instant messaging on-network between colleagues and teams and off-network for customers. To compete, you need to go beyond voice and email communication in today’s world. SMS is now the preferred communications channel for customers and employees. Research shows that 98% of all text messages are opened, and 95% of text messages are opened and responded to within three minutes of being delivered. - Control communication
You may be thinking that you and your team already use your mobile phones for texting so you are okay. However, intermingling business and personal communications can be dangerous. For example, if an employee leaves your company, all of their customer communications leaves with them. There are many reasons (compliance, employee issues, customer satisfaction, etc.) whereby, you may need to keep records of text messages. - Simplify scaling
Think back to the last time you needed to add a wired phone line for your business. It may have taken some time and dollars that you didn’t want to invest. With UCaaS, adding and removing users is practically instantaneous. You can have new users up and running in a matter of minutes instead of days.At iTelecom, we manage your UCaaS network so that it is scalable to match your business’s ebb and flow. The flexibility to scale up and down to reduce wasted bandwidth is key. You can start small, deploy and move resources where they’re needed, and retract once a project wraps up or an office closes or moves.
Evaluating and understanding hundreds of options and feature sets can be daunting. We are experts in UCaaS and other IT solutions, and will help you identify and install the right solution that fits your needs. Feel free to reach out to us here.
