Choosing the Best Unified Communications Integrators

Unified Communications Integrators: What Do They Do and Why Are They So Relevant These Days?

Your business can benefit from unified communications integrators who can understand and implement new, more robust communication infrastructures. It can be challenging to choose the best one due to a highly competitive industry. Providers with these skills tend to be experienced with both digital and legacy platforms and can assist you in deploying a communications system with more modern capabilities, helping you with digital transformation.

Unified Communications, or UC, combines and offers a variety of enterprise communication channels, including voice, video, personal and team conferencing, voice mail, and content sharing. Following the pandemic, these technologies have become even more essential, as outlined in this McKinsey study:

• The likelihood that businesses have at least 80% of their customer interactions digitally has increased threefold since the crisis.
• Only 50% of respondents say digital changes were not a top business priority when asked why they didn’t implement these transitions before the crisis.
• The fear of customer resistance to change is cited by nearly 30% of B2B respondents, compared to only 24% in consumer-facing industries as the main reason to delay changes. 
• Respondents across industries and countries report significant increases in remote working, a shift in customer demands toward offerings that cater to new health and hygiene concerns, and a preference for remote communication. 
• Those who report a significant shift in these areas and greater migration to the cloud are more than twice as likely to believe that these shifts will persist after the crisis as those who expect a return to pre-crisis norms.
• Changes to data security and artificial intelligence are the main ones helping organizations to position themselves better than before the crisis. 
• According to 70% of the respondents, remote working is likely to remain the most common change as the crisis passes.

If any of these scenarios sound familiar to your business, you may be looking for ways to make your communications more modern, stable, and secure. That is why you should work with a provider who is an expert in unified communications. Make sure you know what the outstanding companies have to offer. 

Related: 6 Reasons to Make the Move to a UCaaS Provider

Finding the Right Unified Communications Integrator

Fortune Business Insights revealed that the unified communications as a service global market can reach $70B by 2028 and grow up to 13.4% annually between 2021 and 2028. As you can see, this is a highly competitive industry and researching for the right UC provider can become challenging.

To simplify your decision, take note of the following criteria and ensure you partner with a true industry leader.

Ability to scale

The ability to grow with you is one of the most important factors to consider when selecting a provider. In deciding on unified communications integrators, you should consider your business needs now and in the future. You should confirm if their cloud options can meet changing bandwidth demands. 

Proven stability, compliance, and security standards

An excellent unified communications integrator must ensure bulletproof security and compliance. To determine whether the provider meets your needs, you must first assess your internal security requirements, such as whether they deal with PCI and GDPR compliance. In addition, they must offer a disaster recovery solution that is fully integrated into their system. 

Ensure your prospective providers have an uptime history for their UCaaS network. You should seek documentation demonstrating an uptime rate of 99% or better.

Customized services

In order to meet your business needs, be sure to look for packages that include a variety of features such as video conferencing, desktop sharing, mobile applications, geolocation routing, web collaboration, voicemail, text, and instant messaging.

Your default office platform probably already includes several options. These solutions can be combined quickly and effectively by the best-unified communications providers, resulting in an improved system. Additionally, you should ask a potential provider how much they are investing in developing new features as they should ideally do this consistently. 

Flexible cloud types 

It is crucial to focus on the cloud models available from unified communications integrators when evaluating them. Public clouds typically serve as the starting point for UCaaS deployments. For small and medium-sized businesses, setting them up is relatively easy. Many companies offer public cloud UC solutions, flexible payment schedules, and security features that assist companies in installing these services.

The private cloud option is beneficial to larger companies. Since your business has a network devoted exclusively to your business, prices are higher than those for public cloud services. In other words, you can customize the UC network to suit your needs, and it will not share your resources. Large organizations that want greater control, flexibility, and bandwidth should consider the deployment of UCaaS in the private cloud.

There is, however, a hybrid option available with the best-unified communications providers. This UC implementation model allows the business to continue to use some of its current communications infrastructures. You might want to consider a hybrid model if you recently invested in a communications platform. 

Additionally, a hybrid cloud may be the best solution for companies with tentative plans for how quickly their communications will scale.

Related: Unified Communications vs. VoIP: Which Is Best?

Top-notch customer service, training for your team, and maintenance are included.

When choosing a provider to handle your UC operations, expect outstanding customer service and technical support. You should select a unified communications provider that offers 24/7 support online, by telephone, or in person. 

On the other hand, your enterprise must receive high-quality training to adopt UC technology properly. Therefore, the provider you choose must offer educational programs for your staff. Your team will need to learn how to use an entirely new communications system once it is introduced, so this guidance from your provider becomes pivotal. 

Lastly, you can rely on your unified communications integrator to take care of all network maintenance and support-related tasks. 

Industry Track Record

You should determine whether the providers can be relied on down the road. Consider how long your candidate unified communications providers have been around and look for success stories to ensure they’ll continue to work in the future. 

Since UC has become a critical concern for companies everywhere since Covid-19, selecting a provider who can meet these requirements makes sense. Remember your communications needs will continue to grow and change. Investing time and resources in finding the best partner possible will be well worth it. 

There’s a Unified Communications Provider that Excels

For connecting your people and customers, legacy systems, fragmented technology, or an on-premises UC solution are not only inefficient but also expensive, unreliable, pose a threat to security, and often lead to a poor experience for both customers and employees. They can’t support productivity efforts and cannot keep pace with modern business requirements.

As organizations strive to be more agile and responsive to change, the unification of communications and collaboration is becoming increasingly important. It may be difficult for leaders to decide and choose an ideal unified communications provider, but the investment will pay off in the short and long term. 

If you talk to a BCM One solutions expert today, you will have evidence that there’s a provider who checks all the boxes. Get an overview of how UC can enhance your business communications with a wide range of UCaaS solutions suited to your application requirements and budget. Get in touch now.