The way people work is constantly evolving, and the demand of more collaborative tools has forced organizations to think outside the box in providing their teams with the tools they need and solving complex deployment challenges to integrate IP telephony for voice calling, web and video conferencing, voice mail, mobility, desktop sharing, instant messaging and presence, and more.
This is where unified communication solutions are needed to integrate all of these tools, facilitating provisioning, management, support and guaranteeing a seamless user experience. They bring real-time communication from your phone system and conferencing solutions together with messaging and chat and integrate with everyday business applications using APIs, enhancing the way people work from anywhere, on any device at any time.
But with a variety of vendors that seem to offer the same benefits, how can you make sure you are choosing a tool that will work with your business needs and not against?
Meet Cisco Unified Communications
According to the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications (UC), Cisco is the number one Unified Communications Provider. Gartner evaluates key capabilities needed by businesses when thinking of UC such as telephony, collaboration, hybrid, and management and assesses existing market solutions addressing these needs.
For the last 4 years, this place has belonged to Cisco, but is it Cisco Unified Communications a good option for you?
3 key benefits of Cisco Unified Communications
The following are three practical benefits that Cisco UC Solution has. Your creativity to exploit these along with your trusted IT partner’s advice will be key in taking your unified communications project to the next level.
- Strong Collaboration Tools (On-premises and Cloud-Based)
- Hybrid First
- Integration with Contact Center
Strong Collaboration Tools
Workstream collaboration is an immersive, rapid-response, collaborative work model that improves team agility and effectiveness by encouraging greater self-organization, self-management, and localized decision making.
Combining the basic telephony needs with Jabber, Webex tools such as Webex Meetings and Webex Teams, organizations are able to leverage the existing infrastructure that supports telephony needs with the added flexibility that cloud-based solutions (Webex) offer.
What most midsized businesses tend to do is purchase Cisco Collaboration as a hybrid of premises-based installations for enterprise voice, Jabber-based instant messaging, and video endpoints in concert with meeting solutions from cloud-based Cisco Webex with integrated video conferencing capabilities. The key benefit here is the seamless integration between these tools that allows users to have a quick experience enhancing teamwork and real-time collaboration.
Hybrid First
The more innovative capabilities — like meeting solutions, workstream collaboration and mobile UC — are offered mainly through cloud-based services. Therefore, it is typical for application leaders in IT responsible for communications and collaboration, to choose a hybrid deployment model approach to fully satisfy the digital workplace expectations. This is where Cisco is great at!
From an IT implementation and management perspective, the hybrid nature of Cisco UC solutions offers you the flexibility and scalability to meet your end-users demands without having to invest in robust infrastructure to support this growth. In addition, Cisco's flexible hybrid solutions enable customers with premises-based solutions to integrate with Cisco Webex cloud for calling, meeting and team collaboration.
Cisco’s Hybrid First approach translates in the ability to integrate some premises-based UC components (or those located in a data center) and other UC components in the cloud. User requirements to seamlessly work between the two models are increasingly key as organizations demand more flexibility and Cisco UC Solutions are designed to respond to these demands.
Integration with Contact Center
The opportunity to link Cisco UC solution closer to the contact center helps you support improvements in customer service. For example, when a customer service agent is able to contact subject matter experts, to engage them in calls with customers, or to have a sideline IM conversation as part of fulfilling the customer transaction. This can improve first-contact resolution, reduce the time to serve, and prevent repeat contacts.
This is done by offering APIs, service interfaces and development tools to facilitate customized and productized integration of a range of applications with the communications platform, including the Cisco Unified Contact Center.
Cisco’s contact center solution offers a combination of multichannel contact management, intelligent routing, and network-to-desktop computer telephony integration (CTI) capabilities to improve management throughout the call center. Bu integrating this with your Cisco UC you'll have a scalable solution that enables dynamic customer interactions.
Bottom line, these three benefits that Cisco UC solution offers translate into a higher user experience and adoption, flexibility of management and implementation as well as supporting customer centric initiatives your business might have now or in the future.
Download Cisco Unified Communication Services At-a-Glance
Learn more about Cisco Unified Communications, additional business benefits and successful use cases where the solution has proven to be the best Unified Communications option in the market
