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UCaaS

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UCaaS History

Today professionals along with everyone else use their phones for all types of communication; voice calls, text, and instant messaging such as telegram or channels like slack. The problem with having so many disparate platforms and accounts is that it gets significantly fragmented.

For a long time, company communication only consisted of using a phone and then turned to include email with the rise of the internet. Communication needs increasingly change and so does approach. Communication channels become more varied and as they do the more difficult it is to synchronize. As IM entered the game, it made emails, calls, video and group chats possible for everyone to communicate, however, with little to no centralisation. This is where UCaaS comes into play. Businesses need to communicate with customers, and whether it is by voice, chat or email, they need to do it effectively to retain good customer service.

What is UCaaS?

UCaaS or Unified Communications as a service, is a communication service developed to immensely improve company efficiency and productivity in internal and external communication. It’s an approach to unify all business communication tools and mediums into a single streamlined platform; the cloud. It brings together services such as VoIP, video conference, collaboration tools, file sharing, instant messaging and much more. The exact tools that are included in UCaaS varies between organizations.

UCaaS is therefore implemented in companies that want to embed communication with their day-to-day business applications, as well as cloud service provider. It provides us with pre-packaged communication features directly into the application which provides faster and cheaper alternatives to communication. It also tremendously helps reduce cost and labor associated with communication. Your services will most likely be charged on a monthly fee and there’s no need to implement on-premise large IT teams for maintenance due to the fact that it’s managed by the vendor elsewhere.

The OG’s in the UCaaS market were originally startups that offered APIs for embedding communication. They were around at the same time VOIP was developed in the 1970s but didn’t gain traction until giants like Amazon and Google stared using it. UcaaS is delivered through a Unified Communications vendor who will implement the necessary infrastructure and a platform. Some vendors may even offer support solutions such as; contact center, interactive voice response, and CRM tools. Adoption of UCaaS is increasingly becoming more popular and Forbes projects that 80% of IT budgets will be dedicated to cloud apps and solutions within 15 months.

What do we know by now?

  1. Unified communication apps hosted and delivered as a service by a cloud communication vendor.
  2. Unified communication tools result in a streamlined user experience that provides a single user interface. This includes sending and receiving messages in multiple forms (voice, text, IM, e-mail) through a single user app on multiple platforms; computer, tablet or mobile device.

7 Reasons to upgrade

    1. Lower costs.
    2. Integrate video features such as video conference, web conference and screen sharing.
    3. Easier communication and management across multiple sites and locations.
    4. Strong disaster management process, including broadcast via voice, IM , text and e-mail.
    5. Increased productivity and decreased error by integrating data across apps.
    6. Improve customer experience.
    7. Support mobility by being able to always communicate no matter location.

What does the future UCaaS look like?

One buzzing trend is the popularity of collaboration platforms and it’s only going to increase in the next few years, driving UCaaS to offer better integration with other platforms such as Microsoft Teams or Zendesk. In addition, technology is always changing and so does consumer habits and experience. Technology innovations and consumer platforms will play a key role in shaping future UCaaS and you can expect AI to become a bigger player. In addition alignment between physical and virtual places such as VR will take off. This may include a real-time and virtual whiteboard to jot down your ideas and creatively share it with your colleagues.