Modality Systems | Empowering Business Transformation

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An Introduction to the ‘Art of the Possible’

Contents Page

Cont

ents

•  An Introduction to the ‘Art of the Possible’ 3 •  The Complete UC Solution 4

•  Voice Changes the Game 5 •  Empowering Business Transformation 6

•  Changing Business Process 7 •  Facilitating Remote Working 8

•  Enabling a Collaborative Environment 9 •  Creating a Responsive Business 10

•  Enhanced Customer Experience 11 •  Developing Competitive Advantage 12

•  Conclusion 13 •  Contact Us 15

An Introduction to the ‘Art of the Possible’

Over the past decade, the use of Unified Communications (UC) has increased dramatically, but unfortunately, many businesses aren’t experiencing the full benefit of their UC solution. By adopting other functionalities aside from IM and presence including other applications or technologies, together with voice, video, presence, and messaging, business are able to see the full benefit of a UC solution. Providing real-time access to an individual’s presence information can be useful, but that barely scratches the surface when it comes to addressing key business drivers: •  Reducing costs. •  Improving efficiency and productivity. •  Delivering business continuity. •  Capitalizing on new technologies for competitive advantage.

It is time for UC to realize its true potential and provide quantifiable business benefits.

3 An Introduction to the ‘Art of the Possible’

The core components of UC have created new ways of communicating and collaborating within and outside an organization. These include:

The Complete UC Solution


•  Presence - knowing the availability and location of specific recipients in real-time. •  Real-time and non-real-time messaging – including real-time online chat via IM. •  Voice communications – via traditional PBX and mobile devices. •  Conferencing – voice, video, web. •  Unified Messaging – the integration of different electronic messaging and communications media,

including e-mail, IM, Fax and voicemail into a single interface, accessible from a variety of different devices.

•  Collaboration tools – Easy to join meetings and the ability to create and share documents digitally in real-time.

But UC is not just about bringing these tools together; it is about how a business uses these tools to achieve transformation.

One of the essential components of a complete UC solution is voice. The delivery of enterprise level voice as a full component of a UC solution provides a bridge between the IT and communications infrastructure that enables significant change: •  Consolidation of voice technologies and infrastructures. •  Rationalizing suppliers and minimizing integration issues. •  To reduce costs associated with hardware and support of legacy infrastructure. •  Providing a seamless and efficient user experience

Voice Changes the Game


An organization can realize certain benefits of UC without using voice – such as IM, Presence, automated alerts via IM or email, to gain immediate attention. However, enterprise level voice creates the complete UC toolset that enables not only businesses, but technology to transform, which opens up the potential for even greater gains.

Empowering Business Transformation

In addition to extending the use of UC into existing business processes, organizations can gain additional value by using UC to enable new business processes. These communications enabled business processes (CEBP) can exploit real-time communication, presence and collaboration to reduce manual and time-consuming processes. Solutions range from:


To:

•  The automation of processes and workflow, using UC features such as Presence combined with customised software and other technologies to intelligently add varying degrees of automation to a new or existing business process flow.

•  The integration of communication functionality such as click-to-dial into CRM & ERP systems to speed up a process.

Changing Business Process

By embedding UC into the business process, businesses are creating a more diverse environment which overall reducing human latency in the process flow. •  Contextual and embedded communications to transform relevance and response. •  Communications can be added to a Line of Business application, such as CRM. •  Deliver real-time access to the right people at the right time. •  Skills-based routing & contextual contact information. •  Communications enabled machines and services. •  Enables new user experiences, on new devices and interfaces. This in turn can translate into consistent benefits throughout the business.


Due to a diverse range of benefits, remote working has huge appeal to organizations, some include: •  Minimizing travel costs. •  Reducing real estate requirements. •  Providing a better employee work/life balance. •  Expanding the available talent pool. •  Delivers business continuity. •  Improves operational flexibility and efficiency. Without the appropriate tools to effectively replace an in-person experience, and efficient coloration, organizations remain resistant to such strategies. UC provides the complete solution to enable effective and productive remote working that supports strong employee collaboration and interaction. •  Collaborative real-time multi-media communications. •  Flexible and mobile working. •  Information sharing across locations.

Facilitating Remote Working


Enabling a Collaborative Environment

At the plain level, the UC environment creates a basic way to communicate with an individual at any one time, but effective collaboration offers organizations a variety of additional benefits: •  Enables multi discipline, multi-location teams to share information and ideas in real time. •  Improves productivity. •  Transforms responsiveness. •  Supports streamlined supply chain co-operation.

The collaborative environment can be significantly extended through a number of additional tools: •  Voice, video or web conferencing Integrated communications. •  Information sharing. •  Integrated UC with applications, including mapping.


Creating a Responsive Business

Automation and streamlining the processes is key to an operational and productive business. A responsive business can: •  Meet Service Level Agreements (SLA) and create more competitive SLAs. •  Respond to new sales opportunities. •  Minimize non-productive time (especially for field force engineers). •  Reduce production downtime.

Exploiting the timeliness of UC enabled communication can transform the way employees respond to critical and non-critical events. Such as: •  Alerts. •  Alarms. •  Time Prompts. •  Automated communication.


Enhanced Customer Experience

Improving customer service is an essential component to driving business success. To do so, organizations need to: •  Improve access to the right experts. •  Extend the ways customers can interact with the business. •  Reduce the time taken to resolve queries and problems. Overlaying presence information with additional business insight, from staff expertize to current location, enables businesses to rapidly identify and contact the most relevant and available expert. •  Location based response. •  Skills based filtering. •  Integrated communications and messaging.


Developing Competitive Advantage

In a business environment that’s always changing, it’s important to ensure that communication across the organization is effective, therefore delivering a profitable advantage. •  Ensure employees are up to date with legislative and regulatory change. •  Provide daily news briefs to improve awareness of relevant business and economic issues. •  Deliver regular team updates to provide competitive and market knowledge. •  Access to training/coaching via collaborative web meetings to share ideas. •  Voice enabled solutions can read saved articles and papers to an individual when on the move.

Targeting employees with relevant news, views and education enables the business to stay a step ahead of the competition. •  Alerts and screen pop-ups. •  Text to speech. •  Information sharing.


Conclusion

The benefit of extending the scope of communications enabled processes across the organization is proven to bring significant rewards.


For three decades, CGNet has worked to help poor people in developing countries. CGNet works with clients in over 100 countries around the world, many in locations without modern technology infrastructure. Crossing continents and time zones, communication and collaboration is key to success. CGNet selected Modality Systems for our industry recognized expertise and “get it done” attitude. In partnership, CGNet replaced a 29 year old Nortel PBX that served users in Menlo Park, CA, Kenya, Africa and elsewhere with Microsoft Lync 2013. The Microsoft Lync solution natively supports CGNet’s 24x7 call center and global collaboration needs including rich web conferencing. Modality enabled CGNet to upgrade to modern unified communications while reducing operational expenses and increasing communications with a mobile global workforce. With an ongoing commitment to improving the value and services to guests, Crystal Cruises wanted to explore ideas for reducing costs and providing a collaborative environment for the entire business to utilise now and into the future. Crystal Cruises identified Microsoft Lync 2013 as the solution and engaged with Modality Systems to design, deploy and roll out the system across the organisation, including its luxury cruise ships, making it the first cruise line to deploy Microsoft Lync 2013 and further enhancing the innovative reputation of the business. The introduction of Microsoft Lync 2013 has reduced Crystal Cruises need for travel and removed their reliance on expensive teleconferencing services making a significant cost savings.

UC is clearly more than IM and presence.

It is time for more organizations to exploit UC and realize the ‘Art of the Possible’.

Conclusion


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Contact Us

About Modality Modality Systems is a specialist provider of Unified Communications (UC) services, associated products and custom development software for Microsoft Lync. Combining in depth technical expertise with a professional consulting approach, we have an enviable track record in delivering successful projects globally, working with clients to optimise their investment and the value of UC. Modality offer a range of end-to-end services from strategic consultancy and design, to deployment, end-user adoption and application development. Our consultants are some of the highest qualified in the Lync world, authoring leading Lync publications and carrying out Lync consultancy projects on behalf of Microsoft.


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Modality Systems | Empowering Business Transformation