Tackling an unproductive workplace has long been the golden chalice of managerial targets.
A recent study by Gallup revealed that disengaged and unproductive workers lose the U.S. economy between $483 and $685 billion each year. This issue is costly to individual businesses and has become subject to different schemes and tactics. These include expensive team bonding exercises, training courses, and technology influxes.
While workplace motivation should still be of concern to managers, there is a much simpler way to boost workplace productivity.
Unified Communications can deal with productivity lulls without the need for excessive annual spending on team getaways, office reshuffles, and wholesale employee training.
Exceed the limitations of your software
What is Unified Communications?
Unified Communications (UC) utilizes technology advances to merge workplace tools and channels into one combined system. It provides accessibility to every aspect of communication and collaboration in one central platform.
With UC, anything from phone calls and instant messaging to data insights and call forwarding can be managed in a single place.
UC acts as a vital connectivity system not only within a workplace but also from business to business and business to consumers.
Unified Communications and increasing productivity
UC may seem pretty all-encompassing, but it can be broken down to deal individually with the specific aspects of productivity. While UC will bring together many parts of a business, its benefits will always target the four key categories of productivity:
- Efficiency – the resources, such as time and capital, used when completing a task.
- Speed – the overall time it takes to complete tasks and fix problems.
- Multi-tasking – the capability of employees to perform multiple tasks at once.
- Team collaboration – the relationship between co-workers and their ability to interact with one another effectively.
These vital aspects of productivity can be vastly improved by integrating two aspects of business; communications and customer service.
Business Communications
Business communication includes all forms of interaction between a workforce to develop and improve productivity across the board.
The most popular types of business communications are as follows:
- Messaging
- Video
- Phone
- Apps
Unified Communications platforms such as a virtual office VoIP can manage all of these communication methods and more, bringing them together into one accessible place that benefits productivity.
Messaging
Instant messaging is at the center of our daily lives, both professional and social. Unified Communications streamlines instant messaging by integrating instant messages across all your devices, making communication hold-ups a thing of the past.
Whether one-to-one or in groups, messaging is always an excellent option for quickfire brainstorming and increasing idea flows.
Video
Combining video interaction onto one common platform enables flexibility. Teams can build stronger relationships by communicating from anywhere at any time.
The time it takes to get a message across can be drastically cut with the need for additional downloads and programs a thing of the past.
Furthermore, video calls are crucial in reducing the need for face-to-face meetings. Not only does this cut travel expenses, but it also means meetings can take place on a more frequent basis and urgently when required.
Phone
With Unified Communications, it becomes much easier to take calls on the go, flip between devices, and check voicemails at a glance.
It is estimated that employees spend roughly five hours every week waiting to talk to people with valuable information.
Making it easier to see who has called and to get back in touch with them in any form of interaction would reduce this time.
Apps
With messaging, phone calls, and video calls brought together on a single app, communications become more manageable, and interactions run more smoothly.
By minimizing the time needed to jump between applications, efficiency and speed are significantly boosted.
Customer Service
Productivity does not stem purely from internal workplace engagement. It is also vital to ensure an efficient business to consumer model by improving customer services.
Unified Communication systems accomplish just that.
A productive customer service system relies on agents performing at the highest level in regards to customer engagement.
This engagement is most commonly performed today using these three methods of support:
- Call center
- Outreach
- Chat
Using software to blend these practices together can save time and energy, with the productivity in each section of customer service directly benefiting from Unified Communications.
Call Center
According to a Microsoft study, 61% of consumers state that poor customer service has led them to stop transacting with a business. Unified Communications can help counteract this trend.
Efficiency in solving problems means your team can deal with more customers, and productivity will rapidly increase.
This is achieved by using an omnichannel call center, improving results for both consumers and agents.
Customers can be consistently connected to the agent who would best suit their situation, reducing the need for longer calls and lingering problems. While agents can be monitored and managed on a single system, reducing hold times.
Outreach
A proactive customer service team not only relies on solving incoming problems but also outreach to potential clients.
With UC tools such as a cloud-based predictive dialer, agents can make stronger connections more frequently and streamline the sales process to produce results at faster speeds.
These tools also provide data insights into your efforts, analyzing where your team has been successful and what can be improved.
Chat
Digital customer service is the future.
A study conducted by Software Advice found 63% of millennials prefer having basic queries answered by live chat than more traditional channels.
By offering support on every channel through the same workplace communications system, customer service can reach new levels of productivity.
Moreover, using machine learning technology and artificial intelligence can streamline agents’ workloads and increase output. All of which can be monitored on using your UC platform, allowing you to see areas for potential growth.
Getting the most out of Unified Communications
We have established that bringing together communications and customer service systems can have a great impact on productivity as a whole. However, the productivity of your business can be further broken down into different sections that can be improved through the use of UC:
- Existing structures
- Employee and team productivity
- IT operations
- Organization
- Mobility
Existing Structures
To ensure your business makes the greatest possible improvements in productivity, the existing communication structures need to be analyzed. Only when you understand how well employees are using certain communication applications can UC be implemented properly.
If communication issues are picked up in the form of information asymmetries between different platforms, UC can be used to eradicate this issue. Thus, communications will run more smoothly between different areas of a business (e.g. video conference and instant messaging).
A business should be careful to ensure employees are well equipped to use UC tools. Introducing new software to only certain sections of a workforce or under-trained employees could damage productivity.
Employee Productivity
A significant issue that can be fixed by UC in regards to employee productivity is the speed of interaction. With Unified Communications, individuals are always available for interaction.
Moreover, in today’s decentralized workforces, it is vital that teams can keep up to date with work that is going on. Easily accessible group chats and phone conferences enable teams to work on the go, increasing productivity exponentially.
Results are undoubtedly essential, but so is team morale. Engaged employees are likely to put 57% more effort into tasks than those who are uninterested.
A UC platform can strengthen team cohesion through constant messaging, providing togetherness, and overall unity. Productivity will flow if a team is working as one motivated unit.
IT Operations
Before installing a UC system, you need a support team that can help fix any problems should they arise. You will also want to ensure employees know how to use the system. Consider creating and distributing handbooks to your staff to ensure every worker is fully enformed.
Yet, UC can also ease IT workloads despite the new technology. With everything from internal and external calls to data insights and instant messaging working on one platform, the speed at which IT can locate and solve problems is sure to rise.
IT will only have to learn how to run one platform rather than face employee situations on multiple channels. Down-time can be reduced, and services can run quicker at a much cheaper cost, which is essential for service-based businesses.
Organization
It seems simple to say that Unified Communications will improve your business’ organization. However, it goes beyond just having different aspects of communication in one place.
For customer service, agents’ performance can be tracked and presented on the same platform used to reach potential clients and answer existing queries. Highlighting the direction your business should head through live insights can improve future organization through educated planning.
Moreover, organizing agents into areas where they will perform best can vastly improve consumer satisfaction and help your business to offer world-class service.
Mobility
In today’s climate, this is one of the most critical problems for workplace productivity. Remote work has produced a need for communication mobility.
UC can boost workplace interactions from home or in the workplace by bringing the phone call, message, or video conference to the employee at any destination on a single platform.
Customer service will also receive a productivity boost through increased mobility. Workforces can expand due to the ease of working from home, especially with remote work tools. Thus, skilled agents can come from more diverse areas without the need for travel.
As long as your business implements methods to increase remote working productivity, such as regular office hours or the correct technology, productivity can thrive from a remote location.
With a more skilled workforce collaborating on one common platform from multiple locations without any problems, productivity is sure to increase.
The key is to stay connected
We are in an age where everyone is constantly connected. Unified Communications platforms utilize this connectivity to boost productivity in the workplace.
By bringing every possible form of workplace interaction into one place, Unified Communications creates endless opportunities for productivity growth. No longer will a worker remain out of the loop or an idea suffer from time disruptions.
Not only is internal business interaction improved, but also business to consumer communications. With Unified Communications, customers are connected to the optimal agent, and agent performances can be analyzed all on one platform. This results in an efficient customer service system guaranteed to improve your business’s productivity.
It’s not as difficult as you may think to leverage Unified Communications to your business’s advantage. All you need do is to ensure the workforce and IT department is familiar with the technology and to recognize that it will produce the greatest benefits to businesses currently spreading their communications across many different channels.
