United Communications

How to Track Savings for Unified Communications

You’ve made the decision to switch to unified communications (UC) for a number of reasons, one of the major points being that you know it will save your organization money over time. You’re in good company because thousands of companies today are installing UC solutions because they want to improve their collaboration efforts while keeping their costs under control. It’s a wise strategy because research suggests that replacing multiple vendors and a traditional phone system with a single-vendor option offers both significant cost savings as well as improved communication processes.

So you know all this to be true, but how do you know it’s actually producing these results for your business?
Ensure Your Plan is Actually Unified
At the core, unified communications is the process your workforce uses to seamlessly connect and communicate with each other regardless of location or device. This occurs through voice, instant messaging, email, video or conferencing. A truly unified solution should empower your staff to use each of these communications methods through a single interface. To do so, the UC solution should have an escalation process that can provide employees with the ability to easily transfer from using the phone to instant messaging, or they are easily able to pull in others to existing conference calls without having to transfer to another platform to do so.
Identify Your Cost-Savings Elements
Although robust and powerful, most UC solutions do not provide any reporting or analysis tools in order to track the …

how technology can improve interpersonal communication in businesses

How Technology Can Improve Interpersonal Communication

As technology advances, we hear more and more about how disengaged people are becoming as they spend less time talking to each other and more time staring at device screens. But let’s think for a moment about taking advantage of all that staring and turning it into something positive!

How about using those screens to enhance employee collaboration and interpersonal communication? Perhaps instead of asking employees to stay off of social media, turn off their cell phones and disengage from the outside world, instead organizations should shift their focus to finding ways to take advantage of the use of these tools. Because maybe doing so will allow workers to incorporate the technology they love into the business operations, which can increase employee productivity and interpersonal communication.

But how can businesses today make this (sometimes drastic) transition effectively? Here are a few technology transition tips:
Tip #1: Encourage BYOD
Businesses can’t fight the mobile shift any longer, and they’re implementing policies and procedures that promote a ‘work from anywhere’ atmosphere. Allowing an employee to answer emails or conference into a meeting provides the flexibility they need to perhaps catch their daughter’s track meet that afternoon, while still remaining engaged and aware of what’s happening with the business. It’s a convenience that’s seen as a fair trade.

Creating a BYOD (bring your own device) environment keeps employees more deeply connected to the business, encouraging them to respond to emails faster, return phone calls and take care …

5 Tips to Help Improve IT Department Productivity

The task list of most IT departments is usually quite lengthy, from performing system updates, managing equipment, connections and information, it can feel like a non-stop job. Because of this, many IT Directors and CIOs are trying to find ways to help their staff increase their productivity levels while not overworking or micromanaging their teams at the same time.

If you are hoping to increase both employee morale and IT department productivity, consider these productivity tips:
Tip #1 Set Goals and Let Go
Encourage your teams to collaborate and document their goals for the year or the quarter, then allow them to divide and manage the workload. Highlight the strategic goals of the projects so the department feels engaged and motivated to accomplish them. This will also ensure the team understands who’s carrying responsibility for certain aspects of the project. Try not to micromanage the environments either, as that often discourages employees and hinders their ability to provide quality results.
Tip #2 Provide the Necessary Tools
The best IT department is only as good as the resources they have to use each day. It’s the responsibility of the organization to ensure their staff has the most secure and intuitive solutions that help improve productivity, eliminate unnecessary manual hours as well as accurately identify network problems. Today’s technical landscape requires the implement of a mobile workforce where the IT staff can securely access and manage systems from anywhere.
Tip #3 Communicate
I know, communication is always blamed as the problem, right? …

A Complete Guide to Mitel Communicator

If you are expanding your business or taking your company global, you probably know you will need the right type of communication systems to make productivity and growth happen.  You also know you will need a simple, but robust communications system so your employees can conduct business quickly and efficiently, no matter where they are.  After weeding through the massive amounts of options available, many companies are finding Mitel Communicator to be the most convenient solution to meet those needs.
Enhanced Features
There are a number of reasons why the solution makes sense for so many businesses. First and foremost, it’s available for multiple operating systems and is integrated into the on-premises telephone solution to provide enhanced call-handling features.

Some of these enhanced features include:

Messaging
Conferencing
Desktop Sharing
Video
Contact Center
Enhanced Mobility Features

 
Reduce Workload
Offering has a single-user structure which creates security for the entire system in case of a switch failure. Because of it’s architecture, the system provides 99.99% reliability simply “Out of the Box”, equating to roughly 5 minutes of downtime per year. With N+1 strategy added, the reliability increases to 99.99999% which equates to roughly 3 seconds of downtime/year. 

Additionally, because of it’s simplistic design, the training required for use isn’t overwhelming or time-consuming. The flexible controls streamline communications, making the system easy to manage and maintain. Because of these features, the IT workload is reduced because there’s just a single application needing support with no additional server maintenance.
Boost Productivity with Directory …

Unified Communications: 4 Challenges and How to Overcome Them

The 4 Most Common Obstacles of UC Implementation

The implementation of a Unified Communications (UC) system is becoming increasingly popular for companies of all sizes. Organizations realize these technologies can reduce costs, streamline processes and enhance productivity. These system changes can not only improve the business operations in-house, but also with offsite employees who need to collaborate and connect to various systems in order to work effectively at other sites or mobile locations.

Typically though, no massive system change from a desk phone over to a softphone is viewed as an easy task for businesses. When changing what has become a force of habit for day-to-day business tasks, there may be some growing pains. However, most of these obstacles are manageable as long as proper preparation occurs.

In order to best prepare for the possible concerns with a UC change over, let’s evaluate the most common obstacles:

Obstacle #1 Resistance Giving Up Established Systems

Let’s be honest, sometimes it’s just nice to do things the way we’ve always done them. Many employees feel this way about their phone systems. However, with the proper training program implemented regarding the features and benefits of the new system, the transition becomes more accepted and understood.

Obstacle #2 Financial Concerns

Although UC systems are often a much less expensive option than traditional phone systems of the past, they still require an investment. About 73% of companies with $5,000 or more employees report that cost is an issue for implementing a new system. This concern is partially …

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Millennia Technologies is a full-service voice and data solutions company for midsize to enterprise customers. Specializing in UCaaS , CCaaS , Cybersecurity , IoT , Voice , Cloud , and more. Our passion is firmly rooted in showing clients how well-designed data solutions can significantly accelerate business operations, and then celebrating their goal-shattering successes.