Ask anyone who has embarked on a digital transformation journey and they will have one thing to say—it’s not a one-time process, it’s a voyage. Once you set foot, you will go through a steep learning curve. You will uncover that Unified Communications solutions (UC) deployment and digital transformation go hand-in-hand. Unified Communications forms the foundation of today’s modern workplace with the promise of seamless, secure, and cost-effective connectivity and collaboration. The easy access across multiple channels and devices, anywhere anytime, is ideal for 24/7 global corporations and the workforce.
A study by Statista pegs the global unified communications and collaboration market size to reach USD 48.3 billion by 2023. During the pandemic, the market clocked a growth of 29% in 2020 to hit 47.2 billion, according to Statista. Largely, the rise has been fuelled by the increased demand for hybrid tools for business continuity. Going by the current trends, digitization is sweeping swathes of traditional and non-traditional industries. Respondents are 3 times more likely than before the pandemic to state that 80% of their customer interactions are digital in nature, another report by McKinsey underlines the facts from its recent survey.
The numbers make a compelling case for digital transformation, yet success eludes many. Less than 30% succeeding is a glaring fact. The secret is digital transformation should not be short-sighted. It should be flexible to envelop up-and-coming technologies with a solid foundation of Unified Communications as an enabler.
Unraveling the correlation: Digital Transformation & UC
As stated previously, digital transformation can come in various ways and take many forms. However, if you dig deeper into use cases and real-life lessons, it will be increasingly clear that the companies that have the most success with digital transformation are those that spend the highest on Unified Communications solutions than others. Since unified communications providers toe the line of building a strong foundation and keeping the system in a state of operation that allows innovation and acceptance of new technologies, it is ideal for adopting enterprise-wide digitization.
- Enables all modes of communication such as phone calls, emails, messaging, audio and video conferencing
- Unifies networks, equipment, systems, and processes
- Allows access through IP phones, auto-provisioning, WebRTC, and softphone
- Connects in real-time using instant messaging, voice and video calls
- Helps in collaboration with email, file, and screen sharing across multiple devices
The Convergence of the twain: Digital Transformation & UC
A clear goal from digital transformation for any organization is bringing the organization up to pace with the latest in every domain. The gains do not limit to intangibles like brand image, market reputation, or organizational streamlining, but more material and quantifiable benefits emerge from digitization. For instance, the best-performing decile of digitized incumbents earns at least 80% of the total digital revenues in their industry.
However, to achieve digital revenues certain things must be in place. Digital transformation does not happen in silos. It’s an all-in approach, enveloping every aspect—from customer services, IT operations, finance, marketing, and more. Much like UC, it focuses on both old and the new. The applications used to achieve digital transformation span technologies and innovations like cloud, artificial intelligence, 5G, edge computing, analytics and augmented reality. Unified communications act as the bedrock and an enabler to harness the fruits of digital transformation. This leads to the creation of new processes, products, or entirely new customer experiences.
According to many studies, these new processes or products yield results (ROI) within six months to 18 months. And if there are no visible and quantifiable returns even after two years, the digital transformation initiative can be a cause of concern.
What is the key to a successful digital transformation initiative?
For any digital transformation initiative, probably the most crucial aspects are managing change—in technologies, teams, processes, workflow, and culture. Unified Communications aims to optimize the experience by sustained communication and collaboration between business, technology, human resources, and change management leaders. As digitization permeates deeper, it will drive broader demand for unified communication solutions providers, unified communication services as UCaaS, unified communication solution development.
Digital workers
Using UC, organizations can deploy and bring all the stakeholders under one platform. The platform essentially acts as a unifying force to help each unit work in coherence to communicate seamlessly with IP phones, instant messaging, email, voice, video conference without any restriction of location or time. This enables the digital workflow to be set up and executed.
You can unify communications under one umbrella to meet the needs of a changing workforce. By 2025, millennials are expected to comprise 75% of the global workforce. Collaboration, workplace technologies, and flexibility are going to be the buzzwords. We are already noticing the trend picking up with the push from the Covid-19 pandemic. The nature of the workforce and workplace culture are both likely to undergo a tectonic shift.
Ingrain agility and flexibility
It is rather a difficult task to keep pace with the rapid changes. When the Covid-19 hit, businesses accelerated changes worth years acting 20-25 times faster. Companies deployed workable solutions for remote working 40 times more quickly than they thought was possible. For instance, establishing remote working took an average of 11 days to implement.
Using UC, you can deliver a prompt response to changes. It allows communication across the organization to be optimized by factoring in agility. As the new demands emerge, organizations can quickly move to restructure and test new processes proactively. Huge spending on travel, phone bills, IT management among others can also be avoided with periodic and regular communication between teams, leaders, and management. An organization has little influence over the digital competition in the industry. However, it can ensure greater adoption of the digital-transformation approach to weather uncertainties.
Enhance organizational collaboration
Digital transformations are more effective when companies give people clear roles and responsibilities. A leader who acts as “owner” in charge of a particular initiative to restructure a process is likely to drive his team towards the shared goal.
Streamlining the work process using UC, to form an efficient workflow enhances organizational collaboration. Employees in continuous touch with their superiors on a real-time basis, feel empowered and motivated. Communication mediums such as file sharing, screen sharing, video and audio conferencing act as a glue to hold together a hybrid team and fosters clear communication.
The complexity of IT and business processes are bound to grow. Even moving to the cloud means increasing complexity by adding one more layer. In a multi-vendor environment, troubleshooting becomes more challenging if there is a lag in communication. With UC you can cut the slack, by offering a consistent experience in all channels for employees as well as customers.
Be future-ready
Digital transformation is demanding on the legacy infrastructure. You need agile and network readiness to allow high traffic from the new productivity and collaboration tools. UC solution providers create backbone infrastructure for access to holistic solutions that seamlessly allows to monitor, manage and optimize both application and network environments.
Unified communication for small businesses or large, aims to build a bridge between all stakeholders. A poor network or communication will come in your way of digitization. In the future, the awareness of the benefits from unified communications will help accelerate the adoption of even low-end UC service bundles, by small and medium-sized businesses.
Engaging customers
Making customers happy and driving meaningful conversations every time is one of the goals of organizations to thrive in today’s hyper-competitive world. Unified communication solutions empower you with omnichannel customer service platforms. From the moment a customer reaches out to you to pull out historical information and provide him the right information, starting from right where he left off, is possible with an omnichannel interface.
How to choose the right Unified Communications solutions provider to fuel digital transformation
Primarily, unified communication solution development was mostly restricted to VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol). However, the booming market has seen many players offering similar yet different services. Like personal gadgets, workplace technologies are heavily influenced by consumer goods now. Virtual meeting rooms, video conferencing are part of the new-age unified communication solution. By opening up to cloud-based unified communications systems, organizations can allow 24/7 access and support to global and distributed teams.
Here’s a list of essentials that you must check off when selecting a UC solution provider.
- Offers highly reliable cloud-enabled unified communication platform without any interruption
- Offers omnichannel communication to foster quick, real-time decision making
- Factors in flexibility and agility in infrastructure to meet future needs
- Provides seamless access over any network, platform, or device
- Reduces your overall operational expenses and turnaround time
Conclusion
We are already at the intersection of technological change, with innovative ways of adoption and fusion of technologies that pave the way for the future. It is important to step forward with the right partner. Unified Communications solutions offer the advantage of open architecture and easy integration with other systems making it ideal for digital transformation.
Enterprises face several road blocks due to:
- Multi-vendor Environment
- Erroneous or inconsistent reporting
- Delay in troubleshooting
- Lack of expertise within the organization
- Maintenance expenditure
- Complex workflows
Ecosmob Technologies offers expert counsel with 14 years of experience in the industry across all verticals and sizes and businesses to take the right steps. We have helped hundreds of organizations overcome hurdles to achieve success with digital transformation using UC solutions.
