A Guide to Building a Unified Communications Strategy

Developing a sound UC strategy starts with clearly identifying communication and collaboration gaps within your organization. Conducting user research through surveys, interviews, and workshops allows you to understand pain points and challenges.

This analysis also helps establish tangible goals and desired outcomes for UC implementation, whether around remote work enablement, platform consolidation, or enhanced team productivity.

With requirements established, the next step is evaluating UC solutions capable of delivering the identified capabilities. Providers include Microsoft, Cisco, Mitel, Avaya, RingCentral, 8×8, Nextiva, and more.

First Class Communication has a connection with over 450 partners to create the perfect solution for your business, regardless of where you are in your company’s journey.

One of the biggest factors when small businesses look for UC solutions is scalability. Being able to find UC services that can be tailored to your needs and goals when growing your business is crucial for tight budgets and changing needs.

With a growing business, adding employees, expanding endpoints, and implementing new services can be challenging on your own. With UC, the addition of services becomes easier with a third party, especially when they are familiar with your business processes.

As you figure out what solutions work best for you, unified communications for small businesses can change as well by adding to your network and protecting them under security measures.

Customer experience (CX) services provide features like IVRs, auto attendants, curbside service options, intelligent call routing algorithms, and omni-channel contact centers.

By integrating these with other UC tools, organizations can deliver seamless, personalized experiences across communication channels.

Most UC platforms offer reliable, enterprise-grade voice services delivered through the cloud or as premises-based solutions. This includes unlimited localized and long-distance calling, Caller ID, advanced call controls, voicemail transcriptions, and more.

Unified voice services ensure the continuity of features across devices while reducing costs.

Instant messaging, presence detection, SMS, team chat apps, and group messaging capabilities are critical for real-time collaboration.

UC solutions centralize these, often with persistent chat history, cross-platform access, file sharing, search, and integrations with business apps for seamless workflows.

Contact Center as a service (CCaaS) is the equipment and manpower needed to help manage your business’s customer inquiries and issues. Having a contact center can be costly and difficult to manage, so under the umbrella of a UC, it becomes a feasible option. Contact centers allow for faster connections for customers, leading to a better experience. As a service, contact center solutions are also scalable, making them ideal for small businesses as well.

Much like contact center solutions, live answering services allow customers to get the speedy responses they desire. Even at odd hours of the day or night, having an answering service can greatly increase your business’s reputation for putting the customer first. These answering services can be tailored to fit your business’s unique needs, like budgets or time zones.

Implementing a well-planned UC strategy provides numerous benefits for an organization, such as:

• Increased productivity and efficiency through streamlined team communication and collaboration
• Cost savings from reduced travel and consolidating tools/vendors
• Better customer experiences by rapidly accessing expertise and connecting across departments
• Flexibility to work from anywhere through device and location-independence
• Simplified IT management with a single solution instead of multiple disjointed tools

After implementing a unified communications (UC) strategy, it’s important to measure its effectiveness. This allows you to ensure your business goals are being met and make any necessary adjustments.

There are several key KPIs to monitor that indicate how well your UC strategy is performing, including:

• User adoption rates: Track how frequently each tool is being used by team members to communicate and collaborate. If adoption is low, further training or support may be needed.
• Uptime/reliability metrics: Measure the percentage of time your UC services are available and reliable. High uptime indicates your infrastructure can support usage demands.
• Operational efficiency metrics: Evaluate metrics like improved task completion rates, faster access to experts, and decreased meeting times to assess gains.

Analyzing KPI dashboards on a regular basis allows you to catch any emerging issues promptly.

An effective UC strategy requires ongoing governance through constant monitoring and adjustment when needed. You should:

• Regularly poll users about their experience and satisfaction with UC tools. Address pain points like audio quality or feature gaps.
• Continuously optimize infrastructure performance. Assess utilization rates and scale cloud resources as needed.
• Keep pace with software updates, upgrades, and new releases. Maintain features and security with the latest versions.

By continually reviewing feedback, metrics, and system performance, you can ensure your UC strategy delivers maximum value over time.

First Class Connection offers comprehensive services to streamline your communications. With unified communication services, telecom services, and managed security, your business will be set up for whatever comes your way. Level up your UC with First Class Connection. Contact us to learn more about what UCAAS can do for you.