Businesses Quick to Cut the Cost of Collaboration

Internet Videocommunications sees significant interest from businesses looking to integrate Microsoft Skype for Business and their videoconferencing estate

Businesses are looking for a quick win to unify their communications and to establish a simple and cost effective way to enable their work force to collaborate. Helping their teams to manage the workflow efficiently is critical and historically this has proved to be expensive. But now, for those organisations using Microsoft Skype for Business there is a much more straight-forward solution.

Internet Videocommunications has been working with a whole host of companies, integrating their existing videoconferencing estate with Microsoft S4B or Office 365. Once their communications and scheduling tools are aligned, all manner of collaborative possibilities become available.

On the whole, Microsoft have by far the simplest, cheapest and most widely adopted solutions for office communications. It’s not just internally that collaboration becomes easier, it’s with any organisation that uses Microsoft solutions.

Research shows many benefits for integrating Microsoft with a wider video conferencing estate:

Faster decision making & better productivity

Being able to easily see a colleagues schedule or availability allows for communication in the most effective way. Combining the benefits of video, voice, data & instant messaging allows a business to collaborate in real-time and on any scale, from a quick one-to-one, to content sharing to a boardroom from a distant location. Once delays in decision making are eliminated companies notice a huge upturn in efficiency and therefore, profitability.

Cost Savings

The most obvious and noticeable benefit is that travel is greatly reduced and third party conferencing services are no longer needed, but it’s more than just this. Once fully integrated the old small costs that used to add up diminish rapidly with reduced hardware, software, IT staff costs and most importantly the cost of people’s time. On top of this, voice and video over IP has no long distance charges so connecting people in this way makes absolute business sense.

Service, engagement and user adoption

Half the battle with performing well as a business is having the right tools that allow your people to perform to the best of their ability. Thanks to Microsoft’s simple user interface employees can focus on their jobs and not worry about the act of communication. Once this same simple interface is shared across the whole conferencing estate, Internet Videocommunications finds that adoption rates for using the technology is extremely high.

Employees can work from non-traditional locations such as remote and home offices, freeing up HQ real estate. The workforce, from the Director down, also find that they can enjoy the benefits of a work/life balance, improving employee retention and job satisfaction whilst being able to support off-hour meeting demands. What’s more, even mobile workers can get access to the tools from anywhere with an internet connection; the airport, the coffee shop or a customer’s offices.

It’s not just the internal benefits, businesses have found that the experience with their customers and partners also improves greatly. Most see a great improvement in customer responsiveness and service. Sales and support opportunities get routed to the right person, at the right time and supply chain integration is streamlined.

Success with unified communications is about integrating all communications into a seamless workflow that is easy to use. Thanks to Microsoft and the ever growing range of conferencing systems, there’s never been a better time to take the plunge.