It’s Time to Improve Your Workplace Collaboration
Author: Leo D’Alessandro – Product Marketing Manager, Sangoma
By now, over 40% of businesses have implemented VoIP (Voice-Over-IP) technology within their communication infrastructure, helping themselves save significant costs on dial-tone, but are they truly leveraging all the benefits that VoIP brings to their entire organization?1VoIP allows businesses to consolidate their infrastructure to operate over a single type of connection, IP (Internet Protocol), which effectively provides them the opportunity of UC (unified communications). This means the ability of unifying employee collaboration and productivity tools into one location, such as instant messaging (chat), voice, mobility features, desktop sharing and web/video conferencing. Here are some of the benefits of UC in the workplace:
– Companies save on average 32 minutes per day per employee due to increased success rate of employees reaching their colleagues on the first try2
– Enterprises of 100 employees save up to 191 company-wide hours per day or, 49,660 hours/year3
– 77% increase in productivity when companies invested in UC technology to promote remote working4
As businesses grow and more projects are spread across multiple teams, accessing these tools from many different locations will hinder performance and productivity. Hence collaboration in the workplace is very important.
Collaboration provides a greater level of flexibility where staff are able to work outside of traditional 9-5 hours, from home, or from the office, from multiple devices, all while staying connected with their colleagues. And this fits with the lifestyle of today’s young professionals. Many studies have shown that the best productivity occurs when employees are not ‘chained’ to their desk and when their creativity shines, which could be after work or while away from their desk. It also improves remote worker engagement as all staff, remote or not, benefit from the same real-time communication tools, which effectively produces better results for the company.
Sangoma’s Zulu UC is the collaboration and productivity solution for businesses using FreePBX and PBXact phone systems, providing users with seamless integration of all the popular UC tools, all in one platform. It is centered around user interaction, creating a much more efficient experience for one-to-one, and team communication.
Zulu UC Benefits
Enhanced Conversations
Discuss project goals with colleagues using one-to-one chat or create a room for group chat with your teams. And when the conversation needs to break off into a phone call or screen-share, it’s a click away. All the conversations and file uploads are saved in history for quick reference, using the intuitive search bar feature.
Mobile & Remote Worker Friendly
The integrated desktop client allows users to move around offices and work offsite while having their extension follow them. It is also perfect for environments without desk-phones, allowing users to make/receive calls directly from their workstation and popular headsets.
The iOS and Android mobile client provides an even higher level of flexibility for colleagues needing to stay “connected” when away from the office, without their workstation available.
The presence control feature allows users to update their availability status, which updates their status across all of their devices, so that no matter where a user is attempted to be reached, availability will be known at all times.
Screen-pop, CRM Integration & Click-to-call
Helpdesk staff will appreciate the seamless integration of screen-pop on inbound calls as well as click-to-call phone numbers which are directly on websites and within email clients. And with CRM integration all phone call details are pushed from the PBX to CRM.
Zulu UC is enabled by simply installing the module within FreePBX / PBXact (just like any other module) and managed from the standard User Management module, making it very easy for IT managers to implement UC within their environment.
Join the Zulu UC Beta program by visiting wiki.sangoma.com/display/ZU/Zulu+3+Beta
1. Eastern Management Group
2. MegaPath Blog
3. visual.ly
4. CoSo Cloud Survey