Best Practices for Effective Enterprise Collaboration

Are you curious whether innovative and disruptive cloud-based voice solutions can support your enterprise collaboration needs? Communications platforms have advanced considerably over the past several years regarding scalability, security, performance analytics and user experience. 

Traditional private branch exchange (PBX) voice networks are too costly and need to be more flexible to support businesses whose employees may spend a day or two in the office and work remotely the rest of the week. Your company’s users want the flexibility of using an IP desk phone in the corporate office, their laptop in their home office, and their mobile device everywhere in between.    

Hosted voice services are ideally suited for enabling partner-facing employees and internal operations staff to work just as collaboratively away from your office as they would if they were in the same physical space. 

Why Enterprise Collaboration is Important

The combined skills, strengths, and leadership of many people have made work more productive to achieve shared goals for mutual benefit. For centuries, most collaborations happened in a shared physical space, and organizations often lauded workplace culture as the “glue” that bonded colleagues working shoulder-to-shoulder or across the office floor from each other.   

The rise of telecommuting and remote workforces make enterprise collaboration platforms and voice solutions more than important; they are essential. They are the fabric that connects teams and partners that can’t be in the same physical space, and will nurture that culture to keep employees connected, engaged, and motivated.   

Using Cloud Voice Solutions for Enterprise Collaboration

Although video conversations are often a great way to stimulate interaction and make participants feel together in a digital space, they are only sometimes practical. Roles like sales and customer service are only sometimes conducive to video interaction, especially on first contact, so it’s important to set your enterprise collaboration strategy accordingly.

Best Practices for Deploying a Voice-Based Collaboration System

Before you deploy a voice collaboration system, be sure to talk to your users and administrators about their voice communication requirements and priorities. Your internal operations or project teams might be best served with one platform, while their partner-facing colleagues might find another platform’s user experience and integrations to be a better fit for their needs. Leading platforms like Microsoft Teams, Cisco Webex or Zoom Phone are proprietary by nature but are able to integrate with each other through solutions that a Managed Services company like Yorktel can offer.

Deploy a Voice Solution that matches the needs of your organization

Choose a voice solution that can ease the fatigue of constant video or in-person meetings without compromising the other enterprise collaboration benefits, including:

• Ease of multitasking, like talking and taking notes
• Simplicity of initiating one-to-one calls and connecting with additional participants on the fly
• Transitioning calls between desk phones to mobile phones and to softphones on tablets and computers
• Powerful integrations with business applications for email, instant messaging, CRM, coaching tools, and analytics engines

Effective business conversations often need the context of data from other systems, so it’s crucial to deploy a solution with proven integration capabilities with your existing applications. Ensuring it works with your devices and offers open APIs for custom integration is also critically important. A managed services provider with proven experience, expertise and certifications can help you acquire, deploy, and run your hosted voice services as an important part of your digital ecosystem. 

Enterprise Collaboration in the Digital Age Does Not Need to Be Hard

Advocates of cloud platforms, distributed teams, and web services have been touting the ease of use and administration of platforms like Zoom Voice, Cisco Webex and Microsoft Teams for a long time. Keeping teams connected digitally can empower your employees to solve problems, increase productivity, and reduce costs like needlessly commuting to the office or partner locations when a voice conversation is just as effective as being there in person. 

Effective Administrator and User Training

Platforms like Cisco Webex, Microsoft Teams and Zoom Phone offer a broad range of online tutorials and webinars for administrators and users for any business in any industry. Yet some professionals learn best with live, interactive training in a classroom setting with their own data and workflows. Administrator and user onboarding are critical to the success of any enterprise collaboration strategy, so be sure to contract a managed services provider that can deliver a customized training curriculum. 

Is your enterprise preparing for a migration from your existing communications network to new voice solutions? Do you already have cloud voice solutions in place but need a consulting partner to improve administrator and user engagement? Need help integrating a hosted voice service with your business application stack? Contact Yorktel to discuss your unique needs.