Eliminating Communication Latency Boosts Business

Considering that communications are likely the lifeblood of your business, eliminating communication latency should be a top priority. In order to keep pace with the demands of our business environments, we've got to improve the way we work together as well as the way we serve our customers' increasing demands.

We've all used email and the phone extensively in our professional lives. Both can be used in a one-to-one or one-to-many setting. However, one limitation with only phone or email is that phone excludes data and email excludes voice.

When using only phone or email, response times are unreliable. If people are not available immediately, this can result in messages getting lost in overflowing inboxes or voice mail that can remain unanswered. Unified communications simplifies the growing complexity of communications by taking the guesswork out of the process.

Presence not only aids workers in discovering who's available when needed, but the best way to reach them. This reduces delays to decision making, improves your ability to hit project milestones on time and helps your company resolve more customer issues during the first call—to name but a few benefits that can boost your business results.

Speed and instant gratification seem to be the norm for communications today. This expectation has been aided by social media and Web 2.0 tools that enable seemingly instantaneous interactions. Your customers expect faster response times and so does your workforce.

Unified Communications is focused on reducing response times for work completion by enabling people to choose the most efficient and effective means of interaction for the task at hand. That means connecting the right people with the right information at the right time, regardless of location.

If you're looking for solid reasons to justify investing in advanced communication technology, here are a few issues that unified communications can help to correct:

• Number of customer issues requiring more than one call for resolution.
• Project delays based on the unavailability of subject matter experts.
• Amount of time executives are unavailable due to travel.
• Escalating product development costs.
• Lengthening sales cycles due to scheduling conflicts for sales meetings.

Enabling better connectivity between voice, data and applications impacts all of these at varying degrees. And the impacts are powerful enough to produce quite a return on investment.