For the most part, the days of one organisation working from a single location are gone. No longer restrained by the need for employees to physically be in the same room, businesses are able to make the most of talent across the country, or globally. So, the chances are, either some or all your customers have disparate teams – whether that’s in different cities, countries, or even single employees working remotely from around the world.
The challenge you’ll likely face is how to facilitate their working patterns with your tech and tools.
The benefits and challenges of teams in different locations
Having teams in different locations can offer your customers a lot of different benefits: the freedom to hire the best workers regardless of location – ensuring a diverse workforce and helping to serve customers in different time zones – the possibilities are numerous. And, with ever-increasing globalisation, it’s likely more and more of your customers will work in this way.
But with these benefits comes potential challenges. For disparate teams to work effectively, communications infrastructure needs to work exactly as it should. As a channel partner, the pressure is on you to provide solutions that facilitate reliable, high speed communications. Because when technology doesn’t work as it should, communications break down, meetings are disrupted, and productivity is stilted. All of which is incredibly frustrating, and could even lead to diminished customer service as a result.
How Unified Communications can help your customers thrive
With investment in the right infrastructure, these problems can be avoided. The primary reason that communications between disparate teams fail is that the technologies powering them are outdated and siloed. Legacy infrastructures may mean your customers’ communication channels don’t work effectively together (or worse yet, don’t work full stop). Take video conferencing, which is a key tool for disparate teams. Without robust data services, this can easily let customers down, disrupting important meetings and frustrating employees.
This is something you have the power to change. As a channel reseller, you might have traditionally focused on selling one particular product at a time, whether that’s voice, mobile, data or cloud. While there’s nothing inherently wrong with this, the advent of hosted technologies means it’s now possible to offer a superior, integrated solution: Unified Communications (UC).
UC is the ideal solution for customers that have disparate teams in their organisations. With UC, you can offer your customers an innovative technology stack that integrates voice, mobile, video and data. This can facilitate smooth communications, improving employee productivity while making sure that infrastructure is the most robust it can possibly be.
There are other less obvious benefits, too. Say your customer has teams in London, Birmingham and Edinburgh (or even further afield). Chances are the business spends time and money on employees travelling between the three. With robust, reliable UC, your customers can limit these costs, leaving them with more budget to invest elsewhere.
Plus, should one channel go down (such as desk phones), communications can move seamlessly between different devices – so your customers can rest assured that they can rely on their ability to communicate with teams in different locations when they need to.
The case for your customers is clear. Best of all, even if your customers aren’t explicitly telling you that they want UC, most businesses already have an appetite for more integrated technologies. In our research report, Survive + Thrive, Gamma discovered that 73% of business would choose ‘great integration between products’ over ‘great standalone products’. And 36% think Unified Communications is the technology set to make the biggest difference to their success.
The additional benefits of Unified Communications for your customers
Of course, facilitating communication between internal teams isn’t the only benefit of UC. The same robust infrastructure that enables colleagues across the country to work together effectively can also power better customer service – which should always be the ultimate end goal for your customers. And, since UC is easy to implement, your customers can start enjoying the benefits quickly and with minimal hassle.
For channel partners, the key to success is always working out how to meet the needs of customers in a changing digital landscape. With the rise of disparate teams and an increasing desire from businesses for more integrated technology, UC is an obvious way of doing this – positioning you as the provider who can help your customers drive a successful digital strategy.
