To say that the need for unified communications has grown over the last few years would be an understatement. Employees have embraced the ability to work from anywhere (and many aren’t going back to the office any time soon), which means that businesses need a way to keep everyone connected affordably and efficiently.
That’s where unified communications as a service (UCaaS) comes in. UCaaS is more than just a way to unify your communications tools—it provides a scalable, end-to-end environment for collaboration, calling, and messaging, improving worker productivity and effectiveness. In fact, industry experts predict the value of Unified Communications as a Service will hit almost $70 billion by 2028.
UCaaS provides communication services securely and conveniently, helping employees work from anywhere. And as the pandemic created a greater need for hybrid and remote work, UCaaS has only continued to grow.
With that in mind, let’s explore some of the top reasons why you should invest in a UCaaS solution in 2023 (and beyond):
1. Hybrid and Remote Work are Here to Stay
Over the course of the pandemic, many businesses began hiring full-time remote employees and developed work-from-home strategies. Now that employees have grown used to working from home, many prefer (and even demand) the ability to work remotely at least a couple days a week. As a result, hybrid work became the norm, where workers spend a few days working from home, and the rest in-office. In fact, 74% of US companies either have or plan to implement a hybrid work model.
As more and more companies embrace hybrid work, they’re discovering that it helps improve employee productivity (and even morale) while keeping costs low. Initially, the biggest challenge was keeping everyone connected, but UCaaS solves that issue. UCaaS solutions can be accessed from anywhere (often on any device), as long as there’s an internet connection.
2. Integrate Your Apps and Communication Tools
It feels a bit redundant to say, but one of the most important things about UCaaS is how everything is, well, unified. But it’s more than just voice calls, video conferencing, and messaging—UCaaS solutions can integrate with many of the tools and applications that teams use.
For example, APIs can be used to integrate with apps and productivity tools, improving workflows and user productivity. For businesses that manage contact centers, combining UCaaS and CCaaS (contact center as a service) helps bring all the UCaaS features to a contact center environment, and can be improved further by integrating a CRM (customer relationship management) platform.
3. Simpler Maintenance, Management, and Support
Ask anyone who’s worked in IT: managing communications systems is a pain… but cloud solutions make that a whole lot easier.
Since UCaaS solutions don’t need any servers, ongoing maintenance, or upgrades, they’re far simpler to deploy and manage. This helps save time and money and free up the IT staff to focus on other things closer to their core business.
4. Backups and Recovery
Businesses are dealing with more data than ever before—around 2.5 quintillion bytes every day—and losing that to a disaster or system failure would be devastating.
Cloud solutions generally include backup, redundancy, and disaster recovery, which are often too expensive for on-premises systems. As such, there’s less risk of an unexpected issue knocking out a company’s communication system.
