Embedded Collaboration could be the Future of Unified Communications

Keeping your employees, customers, and partners connected is more important than ever. People are working from wherever they are, on a range of devices. It’s critical to have the communications platform performing, because work doesn’t wait, so employees shouldn’t have to either.

Unified communications is the quest to capture an ever-expanding range of communications tools in a single platform that can be accessed by every employee, across every device. It attempts to unify the equipment, software, and cloud services that provide email, voice, video, and messaging across an organization with a consistent user interface. To boost competitiveness and improve business performance in today’s global environment, more and more enterprises are turning to Unified Communications (UC), which helps companies increase revenues, reduce costs, and enhance customer relationships.

UC goes beyond the simple unification of communication modes to the integration with presence capabilities, providing context about the users, as well as integration with business processes and applications. What makes UC attractive is that it enhances communications both inside and outside of the enterprise. Whether through the basic “click to call” application, or more advanced business process integration, workers can better communicate and collaborate with colleagues, customers, partners, and suppliers, regardless of location or media channel. Businesses cannot happen without constant communication. However, a lot has been written and discussed UC in the past few years, and there is still much confusion about what could be the future of UC. There’s been considerable hype as of late about what UC is and isn’t, but what’s most important here is why embedded collaboration could be the future of unified communication?

How Embedded Collaboration Facilitate Communication

Embedded collaboration offers a core solution that spans applications and browsers to provide seamless communication and place minimal weight on the computer system. Embedded collaborations tools help businesses to embrace the power of transparency and share knowledge quickly and easily inside and outside the enterprise. The concept of embedded collaboration is inserting the collaboration services into the existing workflow so that when you entrench collaboration services directly into the existing workflow, the end-user does not have to change or disrupt the way they work. They just launch collaboration directly from where they are in their workflow.

With nearly three out of every four organizations issuing corporate-owned laptops and smartphones to their workforces and others implementing ‘Bring Your Own Device’ (BYOD) policies, connecting employees with UC has great potential (Frost & Sullivan, 2014). Having the ability to communicate ideas effectively and efficiently across an office or across the globe gives companies a competitive edge in the marketplace. With the use of collaboration technology, communication can now be streamlined through mobile devices and traditional desktops. Modern collaboration platforms offer a variety of features to fit businesses’ needs. However, it is crucial that your team understands the dos and don’ts of collaboration tools in order to secure the greatest ROI. In that spirit, it enables employees to connect, communicate and to collaborate with others in an intuitive, engaging and effective way, in order to bring out the best of themselves and others. Embedded Collaboration empowers employees

• to find documents, information, people, places, etc.
• to collaborate through voice, email, chat, video, etc. into a unified interface
• to collaborate from anywhere and any device in a seamless experience
• to create content across distributed teams
• to control the security of their data

Embedded Collaboration tools bring together the digital world, improving teamwork inside and outside the boundaries of the enterprise and the physical world to enable the journey to smart offices.

The Benefits of Embedded Collaboration and Unified Communication

With so many useful tools incorporated in collaboration technology, it’s easy to see the benefits. But before a company launches a collaboration platform, it’s important to make sure that a particular platform will integrate with the existing software. To ensure a seamless transition, avoid collaboration platforms that only utilize a screen share. Instead, search for collaboration tech that has a sync feature in real-time. By making sure whatever platform is ultimately chosen can be easily integrated into existing software, companies enhance communication instead of hindering it.

1. Enjoy Greater Mobility: Mobility in the workplace has become an increasingly important topic in recent years. In a survey from Information Week, the need to create a more mobile workforce was cited as the second most popular reason for adopting UC (InformationWeek, 2014). Offering employees greater mobility and the ability to work at home is also linked to increased productivity and greater job satisfaction. However, with the rise of remote workers and the increasing number of companies using hot desking, employees need to be able to answer their desk phone from a variety of devices and from wherever they are working.
2. Effective Collaboration: With the right tools in place employees can more easily collaborate on projects, which in turn creates a more positive culture, drives sales, and enhances overall customer service Today’s employees do not want to be told where and when they can work and having both the tools and a culture that supports this type of collaboration allows organizations to be geography blind when hiring giving you the opportunity to hire the best for your company no matter the location. Research from Information Week shows that 62% of businesses said that improved employee collaboration is a top business driver for UC (InformationWeek, 2014). Features that improved business collaboration include video conferencing and instant messaging.
3. Improved Speed to Market: When you’re not weeding through lost emails, disjointed files, and missing graphics you can accomplish your objectives in a more efficient manner. Enhanced communication and operations processes allow you to get your idea, product, and answers to the market more quickly. The faster you respond to your customers the stronger your bottom line becomes.

There’s no doubt that collaborative working is the future. And so, if your business is serious about promoting collaboration, then the starting point must be communications. Flexible, adaptable and dynamic collaborative communication channels will ensure collaborative working is a success in your business.

Originally published at https://nextplane.net on November 22, 2019.