Extending unified communications connectivity, presence and awareness to the mobile workforce

02 July 2012

Today's generation of younger — and not-so-young — workers increasingly expect to be able to work and do business anywhere,
at any time, through whatever device they prefer. The growing volumes of mobile workers and the rapid development of
smartphones and tablets are really changing the game. A well thought-out, technology-enabled communications strategy c

PEOPLE NEED ACCESS TO THE RIGHT INFORMATION at the right time, to make faster, more efficient business decisions; and the flexibility to work with colleagues, customer and suppliers, regardless of who's where.

In our personal lives, this flexibility is rapidly becoming second nature. As more of us acquire smartphones and tablets, we're changing the way we relate to each other. What's more, we're 'always on', available and accessible wherever we happen to be.

Is your organisation mobile ready?

Organisations can take advantage of this behavioural revolution by enabling employees to connect anywhere, anytime, on any devise. After all, a mobile workforce should be an extension of a company's capabilities — being remote shouldn't mean they're out of the loop.

More organisations are choosing to give employees the freedom to talk, use applications and access the corporate network when they need to — from the office, on the road or working from home. And yet, we're still seeing communication bottlenecks.

These can often be attributed to mobile phones; they may make employees more accessible, but not necessarily more available.

Take your sales team for example. They're often out visiting customers. So what happens when another customer calls — trying their mobile — but can't reach them? Will they leave a message, try the office, send an email, or do the unthinkable — call a competitor? Sometimes all it takes is one missed call — and your customer goes elsewhere.

How many calls do your team miss? How many of those result in missed opportunities?

Too many organisations lack the visibility to monitor this human latency; or to assess the impact on the business.

The problem doesn't stop with mobile workers and their ability, or lack of, to serve customers better; it affects their office-based colleagues too.

For desk-bound co-worker needing to make fast decisions it is just as important to be able to collaborate with mobile employees.

Smarter, more agile ways of working

So, what's the solution? Integrating mobile phones into the organisation's telephony systems is certainly a good place to start to enable a more responsive and productive organisation.

By giving remote and mobile employees ‘one number’ — enabled by intelligent call routing — that can be dialled to reach their mobile, deskphone and other devices simultaneously, you can derive greater value from your workforce. And most importantly ensure a better customer experience.

Combined with presence, human latency inefficiencies between co-workers can be reduced even further. Presence is a way of indicating to other people within your organisation what your relative availability is; rather than loosing time trying to track down a colleague, a user can instantly assess if they're in a meeting, on the phone, or not available. Of course, no one is available all the time. With one voicemail, the frustrations, mix-ups and perceived 'poor service' when messages aren't pick-up — often because it's left on the 'other' phone — are avoided. And enabling callers to choose to speak to another member of the team (by pressing '1') can accelerate the responsiveness of your organisation.

Prepare your enterprise for the mobile revolution

As mobility becomes the rule rather than the exception, enterprise mobile communications strategies are evolving from providing convenient reachability to delivering tools that maximize performance.

Choosing a technology provider is the next step.

A wide range of technology options exists to help forward-looking companies to derive greater value from their workforce — a provider like ANT Telecom will help you harness technology suited to your business needs.

ANT Telecom provides system integrations solutions. Our expertise in connecting disparate systems — such as CRM systems to contact centres or to fax and exchange servers — allows users to share information (voice and data) more effectively, and make decisions faster.

One of our key strengths is our well chosen technology partners:

Avaya delivers an open-system intelligent core platform that supports unified communications; and offers a choice of applications, such as One-X Mobile and one-X Communicator, which are compatible with most devices. Avaya provide anytime, anywhere access to UC capabilities — including intelligent presence and single number — empowering users to connect to the right people, at the right time.

For more information please contact Chris Potts on