Four Steps to a Successful Unified
Communications Deployment
Unified Communications & Collaboration
(UCC) deployments are increasing with
organisations now becoming conscious of the
advantages it can bring their business. UCC
can help businesses boost productivity,
increase revenues, reduce costs and enhance
customer relationships together with other
tangible benefits such as increased
responsiveness and accelerated
collaboration. UCC aggregates the
communication services that people use into
a single interface, including instant
messaging, voice, presence, video
conferencing, desktop sharing, apps and so
on. In the modern business environment,
there isn’t a one-size-fits-all voice &
UC solution. The tangible benefits of UCC
will differ from organisation to
organisation, depending and based on
individual communication and collaboration
needs within the company. Hence why
deploying UCC successfully requires a plan
aligned with the company strategy. Below are
our top 4 tips for a successful UCC
deployment: Users come first Almost every
business, and every vertical within it, has
communication bottlenecks and inefficiencies
which slow the workflow. As already
mentioned, each organisation has different
communication needs and the easiest way to
identify them is to look at the end users.
If you trace back these inefficiencies and
the communication activities of your
employees, you can easily pinpoint which
tools they are using including devices,
individual applications for different tasks
and which tools will be most useful to
adopt. Also, it is extremely important to
take into account individual usage profiles
- each department or group within your
company such as customer service, sales
reps, marketing and so on are involved in
different work processes and therefore have
different communication needs. For example,
marketing, design and other departments with
similar functions are likely to benefit from
a collaboration platform where they can
communicate quickly and efficiently to make
decisions, using instant messaging whilst
sharing their screens to present to a
customer or colleague. On the other hand,
sales reps are constantly on the move and
need to be able to join a conference call
from any place with a click of a button from
their mobile device, as opposed to using
lengthy dial in numbers to join a bridge. A
way to ensure that sales reps will never
miss a call from a customer or prospect is a
term used in the industry ‘find me, follow
me’ which involves integration of your
mobile and voice environment. It is crucial
to plan out the different communication
needs of the various departments within your
organisation and having a user-focused
strategy prior to any deployment. Choose
your deployment method carefully An on-site
solution is no longer the only option for
organisations when they come to review their
UC strategy. It is time to consider the
right deployment method for your business in
terms of your resource, DR, growth plans,
budgets etc. The question to ask yourself
is: Is on-premise, hosted or a hybrid
platform best for you? Each of these
solutions has its own benefits as well as
its potential drawbacks according to what is
important to you (upfront costs and costs of
maintenance, DR strategy, resources to run
the system internally, current bandwidth
etc.), and in each case you will have to
ensure that not only the provider is the
right one to accompany you and fulfil your
needs in the long term, but also that the
product/technology they are putting forward
is exactly matching your needs and is in
accordance with your company strategy. At
Solar we work with ShoreTel, which is an
award winning industry leading provider of
telephony and UC solutions. Their phone
system is based on an open architecture
which enables the integration with other
leading solutions including Salesforce,
Skype for Business and NetSuite among many
others. The platform has various other
features including CRM integrations, call
recording, prioritisation of queues together
with other smart telephony functions. Try
before you make the final decision We speak
to too many IT managers who feel the
pressure of making their decision the final
one and therefore delay the decision-making
process by fear of choosing the wrong
solution and wrong provider. It is likely
that you will keep this new solution for the
next 10 years and making a decision for such
a long-term commitment can become difficult
especially if you have multiple sites and a
large number of users. When it comes to
telephony and UCC, most IT managers tend not
to consider doing a POC, fearing it a waste
of their time. Paradoxically, the IT
managers we speak to who are trialling
different solutions on different sites - or
with different groups of users - appear to
be the most serene. Why? Because they get
the opportunity to trial the solutions, test
the service and relationship with the
provider, but also gain valuable feedback
from the users. It might seem laborious to
install a new system for the sake of a POC,
but consider how much time (and money) you
will have saved yourself in the long run by
keeping the best provider and solution - by
simply trialling, comparing and potentially
getting rid of an incompetent provider,
inadequate solution, or both! Train the
users Another crucial but often neglected
aspect of a successful Unified
Communications and Collaboration deployment
is getting the employees excited and
familiar with the new technology. In order
to take full advantage and explore all the
benefits of UCC, all users need to
understand how to use it, which requires
training or a familiarisation session. Even
if your employees already have experience
using some UCC applications such as IM and
video conferencing, training is helpful to
ensure that all users are confident with the
solutions, make the most of it and help with
a faster adoption rate, and therefore faster
ROI. Alternatively, if there are too many
changes and unfamiliar applications and
processes, or your employees are just not
very tech-savvy, a phased deployment can be
implemented. Let the users adopt and
experience each UC component for a time
before moving on to the next one. We hope
this article has been of interest. If you
need additional information about successful
deployment of Unified Communications and
Collaboration solutions, please contact us
and we will be happy to help you.
Read more
