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5 Considerations Before Selecting a Unified Communications Platform

Communication with customers, clients, colleagues, and vendors is the lifeblood of most organizations. When there is an outage in your communication system, acute problems may occur. Today, many IT professionals and business leaders are finding that the best way to build reliability and flexibility into their phone systems is to bundle key business collaboration tools into one unified communications platform. This often involves Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS). I would like to take just a few minutes to share some ideas about how to select a unified communications platform.

1. Cloud-based communication services are extremely reliable

Reliability is the most important quality in any good office telephone system. In the new business environment, that’s truer than ever, so many organizations are turning to cloud-based communication services.

In the event of a power outage or natural disaster, UCaaS allows you to immediately transfer from a failed telephone system to a redundant system via a process known as failover. This avoids disruption completely. There can be occasions when a telephone system completely crashes and you don’t even know there’s a problem because it has already been fixed.

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2. Unified Communications as a Service can help you scale

With UCaaS, your phone system can be built to match your company’s ever-changing requirements. Without having to invest in expensive equipment that needs to be configured and maintained, you can expand your workforce and keep them connected. UCaaS can help organizations of any size scale, and downsizing a business telephone system in the cloud is easy because of its inherent flexibility.

3. Consider features that are right for your business right now

Many organizations have now integrated videoconferencing into their communication platforms. The best cloud-based communication service providers make that easy and allow you to hold virtual meetings without worrying that your screen will suddenly be filled with a bunch of frozen faces.Virtual communications systems also make it easy to integrate chat/SMS, email, caller ID, and even automated attendants into the unified platform. All of this can increase your efficiency dramatically and benefit your bottom line.

4. Find the right balance of features, reliability, and affordability

As we all know, cheap rarely means good, and it’s not prudent to skimp on your company’s phone system. If your system can fail several different ways, but doesn’t have contingencies for those failures, that system is probably less expensive. With a cloud-based system you have backups in multiple locations, so you do not experience those types of critical failures. That security alone is worth the price, and it’s less than you may think.

5. Consider implementation and ongoing support

There is a huge payoff in choosing a cloud and managed services provider that offers a seamless implementation process to get your new system up and running quickly. You will also want to work with service providers with a clear track record of excellent customer support.

I hope you found this information helpful. As always, contact us anytime about your technology needs.

Until next time,

Tim

Meet the Author
Tim Burke is the President and CEO of Quest. He has been at the helm for over 30 years.
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