5 Key Questions to Ask Your Potential Cloud Communications Provider

In order to remain competitive in today’s global marketplace, organisations must constantly improve customer service, reduce IT overhead, and increase efficiency—frequently with fewer resources than before. This may seem like an impossible feat, but the advent of UCaaS (Unified Communications as a Service) has enabled IT departments to be viewed as business drivers rather than cost centres. Companies looking to take advantage of a cloud UC strategy need to consider the shift from a myriad of business perspectives.

How will Provider A’s solution serve specific departmental needs as well as the requirements of the organisation as a whole?

Will Provider B be able to better equip us with the required tools to simplify our communications infrastructure while increasing collaboration and user productivity?

Here are five key questions to ask any potential UCaaS provider before making a decision that will affect your business each and every day:

1. Is your UC solution a true cloud offering?

This is an extremely important question as it could impact your organisation, and your bottom line, significantly. There are true cloud solutions, hosted solutions, and hybrid cloud solutions in the market today, all under the “cloud solution” umbrella. Some questions to ask include:

• Does their solution offer full PBX functionality in addition to conferencing and collaboration on a single, global platform? 
• Are feature enhancements implemented by the UC vendor so there are no product version challenges and all users have the same user experience regardless of physical location or primary data centre assignment?
• Is disaster recovery built-in, not bolted-on and included as a part of the overall UC solution?
• Do customers reap the benefits of platform-wide enhancements such as integrations with other enterprise cloud applications?

2. How will a cloud-based UC solution increase productivity in my organisation?

First and foremost, consider service uptime. There are vendors in the UCaaS market that offer a 99.999% uptime guarantee—with service credits. QoS-enabled networks can make all the difference in the world. If your employees are experiencing network degradation on phone calls and during virtual meetings, they’re not being productive. By implementing a high-quality UC solution, your employees’ workdays instantly become more efficient.

Purchase a UC solution that your employees will want to use. User adoption comes with simplicity. Find a solution that is designed for the consumer but built for the enterprise, and user adoption will follow. All users have different wants and needs—you can’t expect a one-size-fits-all solution to work. Some employees may prefer the mobile user experience and others may prefer a desktop; either way, make sure you have a solution to meet the needs of your customers—the users. Once your user adoption goal has been achieved, your team is on their way to staying constantly connected with one another (in addition to contributing to your ROI).

Make it simple: Find a single solution that meets all of your business communications needs—globally. A true UCaaS solution should include enterprise voice, messaging, audio and video conferencing, and web collaboration as components of the overall solution. Including all business components onto a single, global platform allows users to easily switch between communications modes to collaborate and make decisions quicker than ever before.

Integrate with other cloud applications that your organisation uses today. Take a Salesforce.com integration for your salesforce, for example. As an IT director or CIO, you may not get excited about a seamless integration with an application that you don’t use, but integrations that appeal to LoB owners will increase adoption and provide the business with rich data and control of your organisation’s confidential data. Avoid shadow IT and the frustration that goes along with it by including LoB owners in your decision-making process. Build your internal champions to gain mindshare. It may seem like a complication to the overall vendor selection process, but it will save time in the long run.

Free up time for your IT staff previously managing and maintaining your on-premise UC solution. With a cloud-based communications technology, they focus on other IT initiatives and priorities. By offloading this work to your UC provider, your IT staff will save several hours per week—at least. Your end users will have all of the up-to-date features and functionality of the UC solution at their fingertips without IT intervention. It’s like magic!

3. How do you support the mobile workforce with your solution?

Many organisations are now opting for a mobile-first strategy, replacing traditional desktop phones with smartphones and tablets. Why are businesses focused on a mobile-first strategy? Millennials are quickly becoming the most influential population in the workforce. Have you ever seen a millennial without a smartphone attached to his or her hand? It’s a rare occasion at best. Mobile phones have come a long way over the years. Dropped calls are nearly a thing of the past at this point—they’ve come so far, in fact, that many people use mobile phones as their primary means of communication. When choosing a UC solution, be sure to ask about the mobile solution. Pay close attention to the application—specifically the look and feel. IT folks tend to focus on the functionality of an application whereas non-technical folks expect a modern look and feel in addition to a full feature set. If you want your end users to actually use the solution you choose, be sure to find a solution that is similar to what they already know and use every day as consumers.

4. What is the process to expand my UC solution to accommodate business growth, including needs outside of the UK?

A true cloud communication will grow with you, simply and seamlessly. Adding a new user or a new location should be a matter of licensing and provisioning—that’s it. As businesses grow, it becomes increasingly more important to have a proper disaster recovery solution, which includes distributed architecture design with automatic failover. Your business communications platform is the lifeline of the organisation, and you can’t take the risk of downtime. If you are considering a UCaaS provider with only a single data centre, run! Failover to another piece of hardware located in the same location is not sufficient for enterprise DR purposes.

If you are expanding your business across the globe, it’s important that you look for a solution that provides a localised calling experience for users located outside of the UK. It seems like a no-brainer, but believe it or not, many UCaaS providers do not offer localised calling experience with their solutions. Lastly, ask about emergency services. Example: An employee located in London dials the VoIP business phone for emergency services. What happens? This is often overlooked until an emergency occurs. We encourage you to think ahead and address this prior to choosing a UCaaS solution.

5. What is the implementation process?

With traditional telephony taking a back seat to software-driven cloud communications platforms, it is critical for business leaders to have a future-proof unified communications technology roadmap that combines both IT and telecom goals into a single, integrated technology strategy. Chances are your telecom experts understand your telephony needs, and your IT experts understand your user application needs. In order to realise the benefits of a cloud communications platform, you need a holistic view of the technologies that exist in your organisation today, the desired outcome for your organisation, and a team of true unified communications experts to efficiently and effectively bring it all together. Partner with UC providers that offer cloud communications expertise to help you design a solution to meet your specific business needs and implement the solution in lockstep with your Project Management organisation.

Tip: If you find a UC provider that tells you their solution is so simple that implementation services aren’t required, run!