The business world is booming with over 28 million small companies in existence.
All of that clutter means that your company, no matter its size, needs to work harder than ever to stay ahead of the pack.
But what if we told you that your company didn’t need to double down on its effort to get ahead? What if we told you that you could actually accomplish more while working less?
Accomplishing more while working less is the byproduct of working smart and in our opinion, there’s no better way to work smart than by adopting a unified communication system.
Unified communications (UC for short) is a service that integrates all of your communication technologies into a single, cloud-based provider.
That reality opens up a world of advantages which we’ll dive into below!
1. One Tool to Rule Them All
Does your team chat in Yammer, email through Outlook, digitize faxes through eFax, run conference calls through GoTo Meeting, and use a number of other services for their communication needs?
If they do, you need to consider unified communication now.
With unified communication, the number of tools your team needs to juggle will be reduced substantially.
Furthermore, the learning curve required with learning one tool is much lower than learning 7 or 8. That means that you’ll be able to bring new team members up to speed, faster.
2. Your Communication Tools Go Wherever You Go
We get that the adage “business never sleeps” is cliche, but that doesn’t make it untrue.
At any given moment, a current or prospective client could be trying to call you. If you’re away from your desk and miss that call, that could mean thousands of dollars lost.
Bottom line, if you’re not where you need to be to communicate with clients or colleagues, you’re losing money.
With unified communications, the web-based application that manages your services is available anywhere you have internet. With that flexibility, you’ll be able to take office calls while you’re driving or read faxes from home!
3. Less Capital Investment is Required
Installing tools like fax machines or conference systems in your office can get costly. Combine that with the cost involved in subscribing to a seemingly infinite amount of digital communication services and you’re going to end up spending yourself into a hole.
Unified communication takes a lot of that burden off of your shoulders.
When you can take calls, fax, and do just about everything else – all with one cloud-based service – you end up saving a ton of money.
That savings by itself is reason enough to learn more about unified communications providers.
4. Collaboration Made Easy
Unified communication was built with collaboration in mind.
For example, let’s say that a team member is on a business trip and wants to give a presentation to their team back home. Through unified communication services, the team member looking to give the presentation could share slides and talk over them while colleagues watched with ease!
All everyone would have to do is log into their UC accounts and enjoy the show.
That kind of ease when it comes to sharing information can have incredible effects on team productivity and innovation.
5. Easier Bookkeeping
Even your accountant will love you for adopting a unified communication platform!
As we mentioned in our third point, with unified communications, you can stop making a bunch of costly, piecemeal investments in a number of communication tools and instead can make one affordable communication investment.
That makes itemizing expenses and managing write-offs a lot easier come tax time. It also allows you to, at a glance, understand how much you’re investing in communication so you can make determinations on how to adjust costs if necessary.
6. Enhanced Security
When your team is using a bunch of different tools from different providers to send and receive confidential information, sooner or later something is going to leak.
Considering that the average cost of a data breach is about 3.9 million dollars, that leak is something you should be dreading.
The problem is, when you’re leveraging a variety of tools to transmit information, it’s impossible to understand the security risks each of them present. It’s also hard to deduce what tool is at fault when adversity strikes.
When you leverage unified communication, the buck starts and stops with a single provider. You can vet that provider heavily to ensure they uphold robust security standards and you can also know who to take action against if the ball gets dropped.
There’s power in that level of singular accountability.
7. Better Work/Life Balance
When employees can interface with work from anywhere in the world, they can take that vacation they’ve been putting off. They can feel comfortable picking their kids up from school before the work day is done. They can feel more fulfilled while working on your team.
Remember, happy employees leads to less employee turnover which can save your company thousands!
If that’s not a UC benefit worth celebrating, we don’t know what is!
Wrapping Up How Unified Communication Can Benefit Your Small Business
We hope that all of the unified communication benefits we’ve outlined have you thinking about adopting a system for your business. We promise that, if you take the leap, you’ll wonder how you ever functioned without unified communications in the past!
To learn more about how to take your business to the next level through cutting-edge tech, check out more of our content on Tech Stuffed today!