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Most entrepreneurs will tell you that, while they love what they do, it is not easy to juggle the many responsibilities that come with the territory. If successful, staff will keep growing in numbers, and invoices – both issued and received- will keep piling up. How can the SMB owner make one’s  life easier?

New research indicates that a company with 100+ employees stands to reclaim the equivalent of 6,207 eight-hour work days over the course of a year by implementing Unified Communications (UC) solutions. In other words, SMBs are poised to reach significant growth by simply deploying new tech.

As we’ve stressed time and time again, UC lends small and medium business owners the in-house collaboration assistance they need to attend to more pertinent responsibilities – like meeting with new partners – without worrying that their employees aren’t able to work efficiently. To that end, UC provides SMBs with the essential collaboration options that can make it or break it.

Instant messaging

Simple enough so that even a 10-year old could understand it, this method of communication powers near real-time capability, saving the lost hours waiting for callbacks and email replies. It allows for instantaneous conversations to take place and augments the consistency of internal collaboration among employees, providing a more informal way of communicating. No, IM is not the email replacement or competitor, it is just the fastest form of written business communication, like it or not. In the very near future, given the fact that most people are still dissatisfied with the communication tools they use for business, someone will come up with a system that combines the best of all the existing media; one that delivers text, images, video, audio, history, topics, contextually and coherently, to the right recipients at the right time.

Conferencing

Allows for the deployment and scheduling of conference calls. Say you are traveling a lot between events, offices and meetings with partners. You are no stranger to timezone abrupt shifts , nor to the in person successful meeting outcome. In-person no longer means physical presence, as conferencing across continents is one of the biggest cost and time savers. Besides, paying a monthly fee for a cloud service that provides Conferencing whenever needed is preferable to spending large capital in what we generically call operational budget.

Presence

Using this feature, teammates can monitor each others statuses, i.e., who is currently on the phone, who is in a meeting and who is available or not. This tool can save your team time when transferring customer service inquiries. For example, an employee can reduce a customer’s hold time if he or she can see who is available to take the transfer – rather than keeping the customer on hold while dialing and redialing several employees’ extensions.

Those 6,207 eight-hour work days translate into nearly 50K work hours for a staff of 100. Features like Find Me/Follow Me will save 30 minutes a day for each worker, while Instant Messaging will shave off another 40 minutes for the entire workforce. IVR (Interactive Voice Response) systems win back another 5-15 minutes daily, while Mobility increases responsiveness to save a minimum of 30 minutes every day.

If the above figures aren’t impressive enough, consider this: 115 minutes a day per employee is like having an additional two dozen staffers pulling eight hour shifts. Not too shabby!