Unified Communications (UC)

Power to your People

Wikipedia defines UC as 'the integration of real-time communication services such as instant messaging (chat), presence information, telephony (including IP telephony), video conferencing, call control and speech recognition with non-real-time communication services such as unified messaging (integrated voicemail, e-mail, SMS and fax).

What does that mean for your business?  It means improved communication and collaboration with staff, customers and partners.  It becomes easy to find what you need and to discuss, educate, share, swap and collaborate with other people.  Collaboration becomes a lot more powerful when it is timely, relevant and communicated. 

Unified Communications gives your people that power; the power they need to be better whatever they do – back office, customer service, salespeople, consultants, suppliers, customers and partners.

At Blue Chip we have tested a number of UC platforms internally and we have finally found a solution that matches what our experience has shown us businesses need.  Microsoft Lync 2010 is the UC platform that aligns expectations with features. 

What has it meant for us?  Using Microsoft Lync ourselves has meant we have been able to dump desk phones, dramatically reduce the number of intra-office journeys and started running technical web conferences for our customers. In addition, Microsoft Lync provides us with 'key' intelligence, for example everybody has experienced the stress of desperately trying to get hold of a particular person, only to be faced with a ringing phoneline. Microsoft Lync alleviates this problem by indicating the status of your contacts, whether they are 'Available', 'In a Meeting' or 'Offline' this insight helps you to decide how best to reach your contact. Consequently, Microsoft Lync has saved Blue Chip a substantial amount of time and money and has now become an integral part of our culture.

Microsoft Lync 2010

• Easy, single interface access: Presence, Instant Messaging (IM), voice, audio, video, launch emails and web conferencing
• Built-in desktop and application sharing
• Schedule and join meetings with a single click in Microsoft Outlook
• Communicate, share presence and IM with users of Live Messenger, AOL and Yahoo!
• All the phone features users need including call by name, hold, forward, transfer, divert, park, retrieve, voice mail and conferencing
• Leverage your existing data network and enjoy free voice and video between your employees, vendors and customers

For further information on Microsoft Lync, please read our Suzuiki case study, here

How can we help?

We would love to hear from you to see how we could help your organisation make the most of UC.  We would also be happy to show you how we use it to full effect within our own business. Please get in touch here

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