Five Best Practices for Unified Communications

By AT&T
Posted September 2009

Abstract:

To meet today’s increasing demands, businesses need to communicate and collaborate more efficiently. Communication needs to be timely and effective, reaching people where and when they want to be reached, at the office, at home or on the go. Collaboration needs to include a broad sweep of individuals, cross geographic and organizational boundaries and be integrated with business processes. One way to address these needs is with Unified Communications (UC), which brings together the tools of voice, email, messaging and conferencing and integrates them with business applications such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM).

UC can improve organizational efficiencies, while simultaneously empowering knowledge workers. The efficiency gains come from the integration and optimization of communication silos, supported by enterprise-wide standards and shared services. Productivity gains are harder to measure, but there’s a clear intuitive benefit that could be realized by reducing human latency. It might be hard to quantify, but we’ve all experienced the frustration of “telephone tag.” With a UC platform, employees can see who’s available at a glance, before placing the call.

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