SMBs Look To Gain the Most From Unified Comms

One of the greatest fears for any small business owner is walking into the sales department and seeing red ‘message waiting’ lights blinking on phones. With all the sales reps out at meetings, and no one to take the calls, it won’t take long before those potential customers take their money elsewhere.

This is where unified communications can make a real difference, according to Tom Craig, Global Director Business Services at Vodafone Group. Put simply, those businesses that can respond quickly and efficiently will win more clients and, ultimately, achieve greater brand loyalty.

“As a small business, one of the massive pressures that they feel is they are now competing in a 24-hour society where, if I send you an email, if I leave you a voicemail, if I send you an enquiry via a social media channel, I as a customer expect a response within 2 hours,” said Craig, speaking to eWEEK Europe.

“As a small business, I have more intimate, more responsive relationships with my customers than my larger peers. As a small business I make commercial decisions faster than my peers. That’s fine, but one of the areas they feel they’re losing competitive advantage in relation to their larger peers is their ability, in a 24-hour society, to respond to customer sales enquiries fast.”

While this is partly due to lack of manpower – larger corporations have dedicated help desks, while people working for smaller companies are required to multitask – it is also a question of having the right technology in place to consolidate the various communications channels within a business.

Voice is still the top priority

For the most part, this is still about bringing together people’s basic telecommunications needs: in other words, making sure that their mobile and office phones are set up to work interchangeably, so that employees are just as contactable when they are out meeting clients as when they are in the office.

“Small businesses would say that their primary communication vehicle with the market and their customers is the mundane, unsexy telephone, either fixed or mobile,” said Craig. “And while there is an increase in web impressions, an increase in email as a media choice for small business, an increase of social network enquiries, the number one thing they want to be more responsive on tomorrow is to be more contactable on voice communications.”

This has not stopped companies like Vodafone piling data and cloud services on top of their voice communications offerings, however, giving companies the option to buy the majority of their ICT services from a single provider. This is encouraging a number of SMEs to start dipping their toes in the cloud computing pool, said Craig.

“We are able to say to the same customers, if we’re doing your fixed communications and your mobile communications, and your mobile internet and your fixed internet, and your mobile email, doesn’t it also make sense that we also do your groupware desktop email services?”

This is one of the reasons that Vodafone decided last year to team up with Microsoft to offer Office 365 alongside its UC offering, and the company plans to complete the integration of Microsoft Office 365 with Vodafone OneNet this year.

Of course, not every company is comfortable with the idea of buying all their ICT services from a single provider. Aside from the relationships that those companies may have built up with their individual providers, there is always the risk that, if the network goes down, you are stuck without any communications at all.

Continued on page 2