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Building buy-in to move your company toward unified communications and collaboration

Your company can’t keep pace with rapidly evolving communications if your IT team is constantly troubleshooting and repairing your aging phone systems. If—or more likely, when—your existing equipment fails, the downtime could potentially cost your business thousands of dollars in lost revenue because customers won’t be able to reach you, and employees won’t be able to work productively.

That’s why businesses are transitioning to cloud-based unified communications as a service (UCaaS) to keep their teams connected through one reliable, flexible platform. By combining enterprise voice services like local, long-distance, and toll-free telephony, with innovative remote communications and collaboration tools and mobility features, hosted UCaaS from OnX Canada can transform the way your organization communicates—enhancing the experience for employees, customers, and IT alike.

As alluring as this may seem, companies can’t embrace the full potential of UCaaS until the whole team gets on board with the solution. Building buy-in from the top of your organization down is vital for making your move to UCaaS successful. Here are some strategies for turning skeptics into advocates and securing internal support for UCaaS.

Choosing the right UCaaS solution for your business
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Accentuate the benefits of hosted UC

The first step to building buy-in among team members is being able to concisely communicate the benefits of UCaaS to your organization’s executives and corporate decision-makers. Besides needing their approval to greenlight the investment, getting upper management excited about UC can spark a chain reaction of support throughout the company.

Emphasize the intuitive features and simple tools that make everyone’s jobs easier while adding new capabilities that weren’t possible on your old patched-up public branch exchange (PBX). For example, highlight how UC can:

  • Streamline disjointed applications onto one platform—giving users seamless access to voice, chat, video conference, meeting, and screen sharing capabilities from any device.
  • Connect employees to their teams and tools from any location—fueling improved productivity and collaboration between remote employees and dispersed workforces.
  • Scale to meet your changing needs and growth demands—making it easy to add users or adjust services as your business evolves.
  • Free IT resources from ongoing maintenance issues and investments—offering automatic upgrades, so you always have the most advanced technologies without any downtime.
  • Protect your data with strict end-to-end security, network redundancy, and disaster recovery—keeping your systems online and accessible in the event of any emergency.

UCaaS offers a broad range of benefits to businesses, depending on your size, industry, and operation. Focus on the advantages that sync best with your organization’s communications and collaboration issues and objectives to get your team on board.

Ease the transition to UCaaS

Abrupt change can be jarring to any organization, so try to ease the transition to UCaaS with a clear plan that explains how you’ll pivot from your current system to the new solution. Sharing this vision with your stakeholders can help build their buy-in throughout the UC journey.

A well-planned UCaaS transition strategy should include:

  1. An audit of your current communications equipment and services to ensure that your new solution will deliver all the functionality you need to manage your business without interruption.
  2. An assessment of additional tools and advanced features like hosted IVR and contact center capabilities that are available on the cloud to identify which ones would best serve your business.
  3. Hands-on training to teach employees how to use new UC tools and features, plus ongoing support and access to tutorials if they get stuck.
  4. Phased implementation to roll out changes slowly and work out kinks smoothly before migrating the whole company to UCaaS.

While building internal buy-in for UCaaS, don’t forget about your external partners, vendors, and customers, who will use the new tools as well. Whether they’re calling, texting, chatting, or joining a Webex Meeting through your Webex app, they’ll be able to communicate with your company in new ways—so it’s important to also keep these third parties on board as you migrate to UCaaS.

Although the move to UCaaS may seem daunting and complex, your company doesn’t have to face this transition alone when you partner with a managed services provider like OnX. The communications and collaboration experts at OnX handle all the details of UCaaS installation, implementation, training, support and maintenance, so you can enjoy seamless operations without any hassle.

Contact OnX today to build a strong business case around the benefits of UCaaS for your company.