Presidio Blog

Delayed Communications Stall Business Objectives

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.

Reduce Email Dependency with Workspaces

The nature of work today usually means being a member of at least one project team--often more than one.  Working in conjunction with a number of people means more interaction is necessary to pull everything together.

Teams collaborate in order to:

• solicit feedback
• get questions answered
• build consensus 
• finalize deliverables
• and meet deadlines

Unfortunately, that usually means a lot of email messages that copy everyone involved—even if "everyone" doesn't need to be included on every communication thread. Even worse, chaos can follow when messages get deleted by mistake or overlooked in a cluttered inbox.

Overflowing inboxes are productivity inhibitors. If you've ever spent a day living in your inbox because messages just keep pouring in, you've surely thought there must be a better way.

There is. It's a collaborative workspace.

A collaborative workspace is a secure online environment for virtual team interface. You can also leverage your existing investments in unified communications by adding telephony capabilities to the workspace to easily manage voice communications through your computer when you're away from the office.

The beauty of a workspace is that it enables you to easily and securely include team members outside your company — suppliers, partners and customers, for example. Project team facilitation becomes easier when all members are working together with the same information at hand.

Consider a few benefits from putting an end to mass project emails:

• With the discussion forum questions and answers can be posted within the space, keeping all threads of information on record for simplified teamwork and collaboration. Imagine not having to search through dozens of emails to find an answer to a question asked three weeks ago.


• Documents can be checked out and worked on by team members, eliminating the question about which version is the latest and greatest — streamlining project management and creating a legacy record of the project details and deliverables.


• Know instantly who's available when you need them. Instant message for brief exchanges, escalate IM to a phone call or invite available team members to jump on a video conference to gain a fast consensus for a decision that keeps the project moving forward to meet milestone dates.


• Desktop Sharing enables team members to share work in progress with the team in real time, facilitating discussions that can help to modify the work as a group and eliminate the delays caused by forwarding documents via email for individual review and response.

In case you're still not convinced that workspaces are key drivers for increasing productivity and reducing the frustrations caused by fragmented collaboration, take a look at how a sales team reduced email dependence by 95% and what that shift produced for them.