Photo by Kirill Balobanov on Unsplash
Despite appearing to gain momentum, global enterprise telephony and Unified Communications (UC) taken as a whole lost four points last year, with the market closing at an estimated $8.7 billion valuation. The sub-par results are attributed to reluctance from business owners to ditch their aging PBX equipment which, ironically, causes more headaches than benefits.
Managing today’s complex business communications solutions is beginning to require more than just a guy with a manual and some IT experience. New evidence is mounting that Unified Communications solutions are becoming vital for companies big and small. As the UC sector is busy working up some momentum, industry experts are already sensing the need for Business Communications Operations Management, or BCOM. UCStrategies, a self-proclaimed authority in UC education and information, hints at the need of configuration templates for businesses looking to finally say yes to technology.
Establishing a business today is no picnic. The space is highly competitive, and you need to get a few kinks out of the way before you make your first sale. One of those is communication. If you want to survive and / or grow, you cannot risk not getting this one right.
Imagine trying to pitch your latest and greatest to a packed audience without a microphone in your hand. Much in the same way, your office needs the communication aspect cleared out before anything else. If clients can’t get your message in a timely fashion, you’re already spiraling down to failure.
When creating a new product or launching a new service, the first question you ask yourself is whether it will be successful and you will be able to sell it. Marketing theory says that you start with the user’s needs and then build products/services to meet them. In reality, after the launch it doesn’t work like that anymore. You already have your solution and want to find a way to match it on potential customers’ needs. As soon as you can sense any opportunity there, you can start building your approach.
In this first article of the series, we will start with medical practices. Imagine a medical partnership with a couple of practitioners and a couple of nurses in a small office, a receptionist, and a legacy telephony system.
Surely you’ve heard of Alibaba Group, the Chinese e-commerce and payment service catering to 300 million users in their home land, and plenty of other clients internationally. Their slogan is “Global trade starts here,” but soon they might have to update it to “everywhere,” if their latest developments are any indication.
This week, Alibaba launched its first U.S.-based cloud computing hub confirming its plans to pit itself against already-established giants like Amazon and Google. The reason? Alibaba knows it’s imperative to align their operations with strategically placed facilities when the doors to global business are wide open.
You’d think that a simple enunciation like “Unified Communications” is pretty straightforward, right? After taking my first plunge into the subject, my answer was “I beg to differ.” While UC is certainly alive and kicking, it strikes me as still in its early fledging stages. Strictly from a technical standpoint, it was doable a decade ago. So why is it so fragmented?
It started with a tweet…
Most people try to sell to anyone with a pulse. Big mistake. Selling to no-targets costs a lot & is usually non-repetitive. Focus!
This made me think of something all companies, big or small, older or younger face every day. The combination of finding the right customers and creating replicable selling scenarios makes all the difference.
This is a video we’ve shot two weeks ago about VoipNow Mobile. Please excuse my performance 🙂 VoipNow Mobile is at the beginning of its life, there is still much to do and we know it. But at the end of the day, we want our partners to be able to deploy their infrastructure on over 90% BYOD.
Why? Traditionally, BYOD is associated with high risks, poor compliance and so on. Considering the problems our customers face with business desktop IP phones, we believe that properly done BYOD can provide a better experience not only for end-users, but also for specialized IT personnel. While we do not know precisely how many support cases are associated with client issues on the service provider’s end, we know that about 20% of our support tickets contain various phone client problems, starting with provisioning and ending with illegal equipment usage. It’s a big opportunity to hunt these down.
As Americans join their families around Thanksgiving tables this year, many will reflect on their gratitude for family, friends, good health, and their jobs. Back at the office on Cyber Monday, SMB decision makers that worked to deploy a company-wide Unified Communications (UC) solution in 2014 are counting their blessings, too 🙂
Take a look around you the next time you’re sitting in a café. Chances are nearly everyone you see will be glued to an Internet-connected device of some sort that is producing heaps of data – be it through emails, phone calls, social media or Unified Communications (UC) applications. Ever thought about the role that such an amount of personal information can play in the business world? It’s quite huge.