Unified Communications
Bringing all your communications sources together in one simple interface
EBC Group offers a host of Unified Communication solutions that integrate, simplify and unify your business communications to optimise business processes and reduce response times. Your communications services, including email, text and voice work seamlessly with live voice, audio, video conferencing, and web collaboration, in one interface.
Unified Communications (UC) is a term you may have heard, but are you aware what it actually is or why it’s important to your business?
UC refers to the method by which messages from a variety of sources, such as IP telephony, email or video can be brought together in a single platform for the user to access, in real-time, wherever they may be.
UC allows an individual to send a message on one medium and receive the same communication on another medium. For example, they will be able to receive a voicemail message and choose to access it through either e-mail or a mobile phone. If the sender is online according to the presence information and currently accepts calls, the response can be sent immediately through text chat or video call. Otherwise, it may be sent as a non real-time message that can be accessed through a variety of media.
Our unified communications platform runs on Swyx, which provides the most advanced IP-based communication system on the market. Swyx offers you all the functionality of a traditional telephony system with so much more, including integrating voice with messaging and rich presence.
The main benefits organisations are interested in when looking at UC are:
As a result of the many benefits that UC offers to businesses, there's a lot of discussion around UC. The main UC features allow all employees to easily collaborate from anywhere and in different ways, reach someone (internally or externally) in an instant.
One of the features that many organisations are first interested in, is the ability for a single number to be assigned to a person’s mobile device, home office or other locations, and have calls follow the person or push/pull between devices without having to disconnect and then reconnect the call.
Another popular feature, known as voicemail-to-email, allows voice messages to reach managers or employees when they’re away from the office or working remotely by sending an audio file of the voicemail (such as an MP3, MP4 or .wav file) to the recipient’s email. The recipient can then listen to the voice via email without having to dial into voicemail. This makes it easy to forward a voicemail, for instance, because all you need to do is forward the email and its sound-file attachment.
Other unified communications software tools may include a downloadable client that enables click-to-dial and service management from within commonly used email client software or web browsers. It can even include tools which redirect calls to back-up numbers if there’s a power outage or network issues.
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As part of our telephony package you get access to enhanced functionality such as rich presence information, but what is it and why does your business need it?
If your business has difficulty reaching its people, whether they are in the office or on the road, then presence technology could help you to work in a much smarter way. Presence information, often referred to as ‘rich presence’ or ‘presence technology’ is not a feature that you will find on a traditional office phone system, but it’s helping to transform business by providing real time access to employees and staff members wherever they are.
Real-time information gives you access to critical information, immediately, when you need it, rather than waiting or leaving messages for people to get back to you. Presence technology is a type of real time information which is vital for effective mobile working - the feature provides seamless communications from people at home to people on the move and people in the office.
As the technology syncs seamlessly with your current desktop applications including Microsoft Outlook, the system is able to combine contact lists with updates from a user’s calendar. Equally, a user is able to change and update their presence status easily via the user dashboard. For example if an employee is in a meeting or on a call, the user’s contact profile is updated automatically, informing their contacts that they are busy or unavailable. Presence information helps employees find and communicate with one another efficiently and effectively.
Presence information in Swyx allows you to display your status of availability to other employees. Team members therefore know who is logged on and/or available, and can reach the right person immediately. Saving time and avoiding unsuccessful communication attempts.
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Being able to define your own speed dials for internal and external contacts means that you can access frequently dialled numbers as quickly as possible. Create your own tabs which help you to structure your speed dials, such as by classifying them by departments. In addition a call journal will provide an overview of all incoming and outgoing calls, redials, missed calls, own callback requests, and recorded calls.
You will want to have both a company-wide phone book and a personal phone book available. Swyx enables the company phone book to show presence information, which means the user can search easily for entries within phone books or directly. Using the practical hotkey functionality, you can select and dial phone numbers in any Windows application at just the click of a mouse.
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Thanks to the Swyx Connector for Skype, all enterprises who use Swyx and at the same time rely on Skype for Business, can now easily take advantage of Swyx’s telephony functions, adding extensive telephone system functionality to their corporate communication in an easy and convenient way. The benefit is manifold, complementing and combining Skype’s Messaging and Collaboration features with the extensive telephony functions of Swyx.
The Swyx Connector for Skype for Business is intended for enterprises which are using:
With the Swyx Connector for Skype you can seamlessly integrate all essential telephony features into the Skype interface. This means: No extra port for users to switch applications to use all performance features.
If you already use Swyx and Skype in your company all you have to do is to install the Swyx Connector on your PC workstation. This forms part of the installation package and is selected as an additional installation option. Once installation is complete you can use exclusively the Skype user interface to control all telephony functions.
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