Latin America. Currently, 60% of employees worldwide spend more than half of their workday time away from their office. Being away from a desk is no longer an excuse for not being able to perform all day-to-day tasks or be able to meet the needs of customers. In addition, immediate access to the Internet from virtually anywhere enables workers to be productive wherever they are.
However, not all communication applications are created equal. Some offer only minimal functionality or have failed to take into account the needs of today's mobile workforce. In the last ten years, unified communications (UC) solutions have added collaboration tools such as: Functionalities for contact center, video conferencing, unified messaging and one-click calls.
New users who want to upgrade their mobile unified communications solution for the first time may struggle to keep up with the evolving UC feature set. BroadSoft offers an overview of the main points to consider when adopting a mobile UC solution:
- Open management: Management features come in two levels, one for administrators and one for end users. The efficiency of the levels can have a significant positive effect on the total cost of ownership (TCO) if the interfaces are intuitive and easy to use. Fortunately, both administrative and end-user controls have evolved significantly over the past decade. However, some management systems are better than others.
- Collaboration: The collaboration features of a UC system offer the opportunity for long-term savings because collaboration increases employee productivity. Click-to-call and conferencing functions are standard in UC systems and, when combined with presence, they can save time by bringing experts together at one time. Video collaboration should include the ability to share documents, screens, and presentations. For meetings that have to be held face-to-face, video conferencing can save on travel expenses, while still offering the best communication provided by a visual telepresence connection.
- Security: As with any other service traveling over an IP connection, UCs need standard data network security features such as authentication. Encryption is also a recommended feature. At a minimum, the UC solution should offer media encryption, although the need for signaling encryption is less stringent.
- Reliability: Depending on the size of the company, this can be done internally or by a third party, but ensuring that the underlying infrastructure is reliable and secure is paramount to any successful UC implementation. Similarly, UC sessions ultimately rely on an outside company's network, so service level agreements negotiated with the company are also integral to assured reliability. Look for a UC system that ensures redundancy, geographic diversity, and a distributed architecture.
- Scalability: If a company grows from 100 to 100,000 employees, the original investment must be protected. Obviously, a system that supports 100,000 employees will require more hardware and better software licensing than a system for 100 employees. But the cost per employee should not be excessive in any of the models, and the same features should be available regardless of the size of the company; we must remember that scalability should not be limited to call processing alone.
- Cloud options: The advantages of a cloud-based service over an on-premise solution often boil down to whether the company wants to avoid the initial capital expenditure for an on-premises-based system, but a business model can be made for both options. Cloud services also offer an immediate cost management advantage because they are managed by a third party. If well designed, a cloud-based UC service also offers greater reliability through features like geo-redundancy and secure data centers.
- All networks, in any circumstance: Any mobile client must be able to take advantage of every type of network to which it is connected. Mainly 4G/LTE networks in most developed countries and WiFi for home/office. But as we know, sometimes the network performance is not optimal. Airplanes, WiFi, conference rooms in basements can provide poor network performance. Your application must be able to dynamically switch between these networks to get the performance it needs.
- Smart integration: Finally, it's not just about calls and messages. Access to relevant key information while talking to customers, colleagues and partners is important for efficient communications when workers are away from their offices. A unified communications mobile app must be tightly integrated with other cloud services such as Office 365, G Suite, and Salesforce.com.
BroadSoft bMobile cloud applications and services are the best choice for any business with a mobile workforce that needs flexibility to work from anywhere at any time.
Text written by David Rosenthal, UC Evangelist for BroadSoft
