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By Gia McNutt
Can your colleagues and customers reach you when they need to?
Before you answer, remember that they may not know whether you are sitting at your desk, working from home, or out of town on a business trip. They don’t know if their best chance of reaching you is by office phone, cell phone, PDA, e-mail, Instant Message or fax.
A survey of over 200 small, medium, and large organizations showed that more than half the time, coworkers can't even reach one another on the first try. Think of how much harder it is for someone calling in from the outside. Think of the delays that can cause. That same survey showed that 93 percent of organizations at one point have missed a deadline because they couldn't reach key decision-makers.
The odds improve greatly when all these communications devices are integrated with Unified Messaging or a “universal access number.” That gives you a single in-box to take any kind of message, from faxes to voice messages. You can read, listen, and/or respond to any of them from your desktop computer or your cell phone.
Better yet, the colleague has a much better chance of reaching you without having to leave a message at all. Instead of trying the office and the cell before reaching you by PDA, they can find you instantly. Instead of spending 14 minutes trying to connect, it could be done in 14 seconds. That saves time and money for all involved.
Now imagine saving those minutes on several calls a day, multiplied by the number of people in the office. That’s a tremendous increase in productivity and profitability.
VoIP to the Rescue
It can’t be done with an old-fashioned telephone system, but it is easy when you integrate common applications with a telephony system based on Voice over Internet Protocol. VoIP, sometimes called IP telephony, is a way of sending voice and data over the same network.
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