Five Steps You Need to Know for a Successful UC and C Deployment

For many businesses to function in the current competitive economic climate they must be are able to effectively connect employees, partners, suppliers and customers. Today’s distributed, 24x7 working environments demand that people collaborate and remain productive even when out of the traditional office setting. Flexibility, agility and cost-effectiveness are all vital.

Unified communications and collaboration (UC&C) applications—comprising voice over IP, audio, video, and web conferencing, unified messaging, immersive video and presence capabilities—offer a way to significantly improve the way that your employees interact and perform, and can bring positive results on an individual, team and enterprise-wide basis. UC&C allows disparate forms of communications services and devices used by individuals to be channelled to benefit your organization as a whole. But that’s not all. UC&C can also have a positive effect on your revenue, competitiveness and efficiency. It can enable your organization to be more agile than ever before as the ability to contact or respond to anyone, at any time, on almost any device, powers a new wave of productivity. Processes that take hours today can be completed in minutes.

As with any technology deployment, in order to really deliver benefit to your business, you must ensure that your technology is aligned with your business processes. The objective is to make communication simple and deliver a user experience that feels as ‘natural’ as possible.

So what steps do you need to take when considering UC&C implementation?

1. First, it’s about ensuring you work hard to capture your business requirements

.

2. Once you know what your business needs, you can then proceed to evaluate technologies and vendors, and draw up a roadmap to take you from decision making to delivery.
3. Then it’s about designing your solution, including third party interconnections, recording and streaming, contact routing, and bandwidth management policies.
4. Next, considerations for room planning, and the all-important user rollout plan.
5. Finally, when you are ready to deploy, it’s about providing integration between the various elements of the solution, building in software and firmware upgrades and solution healthchecks, followed by network and room readiness assessments.

After all is accounted for, the final step – but perhaps the most vital -- you have to get people to actually use the technology! This can be one of the hardest steps to achieve – people are often afraid of doing things differently, or shy about being visible when communicating. However, word of mouth from a positive user experience spreads fast. And once teams have experienced collaboration via mobile, desktop, meeting room, collaborative work room and Telepresence video, they soon realize the benefit.

Ultimately UC&C solutions can help you be more productive through reduced travel while maintaining rich interactions and relationships and creating and taking advantage of new business opportunities.

For more information about how we can help improve your business with UC&C solutions, visit us online at verizonenterprise.com/products/advanced-communications/.