How to Develop a Successful UCC Business Plan and Roadmap
Businesses should start by examining six key areas:
- Voice: fixed, mobile, smartphone
- Conferencing: audio, video, web
- IM/Presence: IM, rich presence, persistent chat
- Messaging: email, voicemail, unified messaging
- Clients: thick- and thin-web, mobile
- Applications: collaboration, contact center, CEBP
See what products and infrastructures you currently have in place, and then identify strategic vendors and partners for improvements.
Next, start developing ideas for projects. Some common projects include:
- Voice: IP-PBX migration, fixed-mobile integration, MS Lync evaluation
- Conferencing: audio and web integration, video migration
- IM/Presence: IM/presence deployment, shared work space
- Messaging: email migration, voicemail/UM migration
- Clients: voice client evaluation, smartphone integration
- Infrastructure: VoIP and video readiness tests, LAN & WAN upgrades.
We recommend deploying these projects incrementally. The more projects you run concurrently, the greater the risk.
These UCC projects provide a range of cost-saving opportunities. Here are a few examples:
- Softphones eliminate the cost of physical phones and placing calls
- Conferencing reduces travel costs
- IM reduces phone calls and voicemail
- Consolidated contact center platforms as well as email and voicemail servers reduce management costs
Many other harder-to-quantify benefits and opportunities also exist, including: untethered desks, click-to-call, workgroup productivity, and text-to-speech and speech-to-text email/voicemail capabilities.
For more information on how unified communications can help your business, go to stlcom.com or call us at (800)993-4785
