UCaaS consolidates communication tools like telephony, instant messaging, and conferencing into one application or platform. Choose a supplier that provides a scalable and adaptable platform so you can add or delete tools in response to changes in your company’s requirements.
Make sure the uptime and performance history of your service are vital. Many vendors post SLA agreements and offer insights into their uptime.
Features
What is UCaaS? In today’s digital age, effective communication is vital for organizational success. Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) is a cloud-based solution that provides a comprehensive suite of communication and collaboration tools, streamlining workflows and fostering efficiency.UCaaS offers many benefits that can help your organization improve productivity. For example, it can simplify communications by consolidating multiple channels and services into one app. This makes it easier for employees to communicate and collaborate regardless of their communication channel.
Another essential feature of UCaaS is integration with line-of-business applications. This can include click-to-call within a business chat app or automated scheduling of calls and meetings with a company calendar. This helps automate workflows and reduce manual data entry, freeing time for other tasks.
It also provides improved scalability. The cloud model makes adding or removing users and scaling up or down licenses easy. This can be especially useful for companies who run remote offices or have a fluctuating workforce regarding the number of employees or work locations.
Finally, UCaaS can reduce management burden by offloading maintenance tasks typically handled by an internal IT team. For instance, a UCaaS vendor or a managed service provider can take security maintenance and routine platform updates. This allows IT to focus on other projects and initiatives.
It’s also a good idea to check out the UCaaS providers’ service and support offerings, including their level of expertise, availability, how fast issues get resolved, and whether they offer dedicated support representatives. You’ll also want to examine how they price these services, which may be bundled into different packages (e.g., bronze, silver, gold) with varying monthly costs per license.
Pricing
Most UCaaS providers offer subscription-based pricing models that are flexible enough to accommodate most businesses’ budgetary needs. Most providers provide basic functionality in their most affordable plans with the option to upgrade to more advanced features a la carte or as part of a bundled pricing tier.
As with any business communications solution, it is essential to consider all of the associated costs. Besides subscription, licensing, and implementation costs, businesses should consider any upfront hardware or equipment requirements for the system to work correctly. In addition, there are likely to be ongoing costs for maintenance, support, and upgrading the software as your organization evolves.
Finally, businesses should consider any compliance and security costs incurred using a UCaaS solution. These include the EU’s GDPR, California’s Consumer Privacy Act, HIPAA regulations, and other industry or government compliance measures.
In addition to these cost considerations, it is also vital for companies to look at a provider’s scalability and agility. As the workforce shifts to working remotely and BYOD policies become more commonplace, it is essential that your unified communications system can operate across multiple communication channels and devices with ease and flexibility. A good UCaaS provider will enable this business agility and have the scalability necessary to expand its capabilities as your organization grows.
Integrations
UCaaS is a software-as-a-service model, meaning that end users don’t have to host the unified communications platform onsite or handle hardware maintenance and upgrades. Instead, the UCaaS provider manages the system in a secure data center with multiple global points of presence and 24/7 monitoring.
This enables end-users to access communications tools remotely, which makes hybrid and remote work more accessible than ever. Additionally, the cloud-based model enables UCaaS to scale faster than onsite systems, saving organizations time and money.
When choosing a UCaaS solution, look for integrations that allow your team to integrate the communication platform with other business applications. This way, employees can use the communications platform as a single tool without having to open and close different applications and boost productivity.
UCaaS tools such as VoIP phone systems, conferencing software, and team messaging apps offer this functionality. The UCaaS solution Dialpad, for example, features VoIP calling for businesses of any size, web conferencing, and mobile calling. Its collaboration software also includes automatic note-taking and native AI insights into calling, as well as call recording and speech recognition.
This UCaaS solution also offers robust security measures to protect sensitive information, including SAML and SCIM access management, SSO, and automated user provisioning. It also complies with GDPR, Privacy Shield, SOC2 Type II, CSA, and HIPAA to protect customer data. Moreover, it prioritizes data ownership with customizable data retention policies.
Security
With the advent of UCaaS, security concerns are a top consideration. UCaS handles large amounts of your organization’s (and customers’) data, and you need to be sure that the provider you choose has protocols to protect this sensitive information. It’s also important to understand whether the UCaaS platform offers features that meet your industry’s or business’s needs.
For instance, if you operate in a highly regulated sector, like healthcare or finance, your UCaaS solution should offer the ability to implement encryption for voice communications. This is vital to help secure your data and reduce the risk of breaches or fines.
Finally, it would help if you ensured that the UCaaS provider uses reliable and secure cloud infrastructure. This is important to ensure your business can rely on the system even during high traffic.
A reliable and secure infrastructure should also allow fast, low-latency network connections between offices and headquarters. This helps to eliminate delays in communication and improve productivity. In addition, a UCaaS provider should offer virtualized private network solutions for remote workers. This helps to protect data from hackers who often use free Wi-Fi to access company systems. A VPN can also provide a way to monitor call logs and other usage activity and prevent system misuse.
