How can Unified Communications help a multi-site business?
Managing communications across all sites of your business with a traditional PBX can be a nightmare. Staff at one site are almost always entirely unaware of what is going on at another – one site can be inundated with calls, whilst another takes none. This has obvious impacts on business efficiency and productivity, not to mention the morale of employees. With all sites using separate business phone systems, it is difficult even for head offices to get a clear picture of the distribution of workload across a business. Until, that is, you receive the bill from your communications supplier at the end of the month. Not ideal.
Unifying Communications is the first step to improving workplace efficiency
In any multi-site business, there are always going to be busy and quiet sites. Naturally the busy sites will receive more calls, and therefore more potential business, than the quieter sites. Not only do the staff at your busiest sites have to deal with the most customers face-to-face, they also have to deal with the most phone calls. Without a centralised phone system, distributing calls fairly among the less busy sites is a near impossibility.
The obvious answer is to migrate to a cloud-based Unified Communications (UC) platform, which would offer a single, centralised dashboard to control all call routing across your entire estate of phones and numbers. One of the primary benefits of such a set-up is transparent reporting on all sites, all numbers and all staff. For example, have you ever wondered how many calls each of your sites miss, and how much missed revenue this could mean? UC platforms are able to generate reports hourly, daily or weekly to give you an idea of how many calls have been taken, missed and placed from each site.
Not only can this help reduce the number of calls you miss as a business, it can also highlight under-performing and over-worked sites. The reporting and analytics capabilities of UC systems are hugely powerful in their own right, but these platforms really come into their own when you want to amend call routing across your entire business. Instead of having one number for each site you could implement a single main business number for all sites and then route calls dynamically according to workload.
Communications isn’t just about phones any more
Built-in presence panels give another huge productivity boost; seeing who is available at each site will help your staff collaborate more effectively and will invariably lead to better and faster responses to customer queries. We’ve also found that presence panels bridge gaps between offices, helping to create a team atmosphere among colleagues on different sites. The resulting improvement in employee morale is not to be underestimated.
Of course, there are many, many more operational benefits to Unified Communications, but you may not have considered business continuity and disaster recovery. These aren’t pleasant topics but it’s always wise to have a plan in place. Using a cloud-based UC platform should help ease any worries you have; if one site were to have a power-cut for example, the UC platform would see the phones drop offline and automatically re-route calls to other available sites.
How can 5G Communications help?
5G Communications have partnered with industry-leading manufacturers to bring Unified Communications to businesses in the UK. Ericsson-LG’s expertise combines perfectly with our customer-focused approach making modernising your communications a breeze. Unlike many other communications suppliers our job does not stop once we’ve installed your system. We will work with you every step of the way to ensure you’re comfortable with the operation of your new platform and give award-winning support and customer service if you have any questions. We believe our friendly and caring approach is unique among our competitors and adds a lot of value to our already competitively priced solutions.
We don’t just ‘do’ phone systems either – alongside Ericsson-LG’s impressive UC platform we offer all communications services you may need as a business to make use of the latest technology. We have brought our unique attitude to the worlds of business mobiles, IT support and even gas and electric supply to make running your business as easy as possible. You’re the expert of your business, so why not let us take care of everything else? Have a friendly chat with us today to find out how we could help. We’d love to hear from you. You can call us on 01494 523 523 or email sales@5gcomms.com.