The global marketplace is no longer the exclusive domain of huge multinational corporations like Amazon, Walmart and Coca-Cola. Business of all sizes are now expanding overseas to reach new customers, reduce manufacturing costs and expand their talent pool. According to one recent study, more than half of U.S. small businesses now have international customers and about three-quarters say overseas expansion is necessary for long-term growth.
Communication Challenges in a Global Market
Communication challenges can make it difficult to operate effectively in the intensely competitive global marketplace, however. Employees need the ability to easily communicate with colleagues, customers and partners in different offices, time zones and countries. Customers need to contact you without dialing an international number.
Legacy on-premises telephone systems are poorly equipped to handle such demands. Inflexible infrastructure, outdated features, fragmented applications and limited mobility capabilities create quality and operational issues. That’s a big reason why the global market for flexible, cloud-based communications systems grew by nearly 25 percent in 2020, according to the latest figures from IDC.
UCaaS Benefits
Cloud-based Unified Communications-as-a-Service (UCaaS) solutions make it easier to reliably connect and share information with people inside and outside of an organization, whether they are just down the hall or halfway around the world. UCaaS overcomes many of the limitations of legacy PBX systems by creating a single platform that tightly integrates voice, video, text and mobile communications.
One of the chief advantages of UCaaS is that it eliminates the need to purchase, install and configure expensive on-premises hardware at every international location. That is an incredibly difficult process that typically involves working with local providers to provision international phone numbers and calling plans for each region, while also ensuring compliance with each country’s unique telecom regulations. Systems in one region aren’t always compatible with those in other regions, which can make collaboration particularly challenging.
Organizations can avoid that complexity with UCaaS. These solutions are delivered in a multi-tenant model with a single software instance serving multiple locations, so that users in Richmond are operating with the same system as their colleagues in Rotterdam. Features such as mobile extension or single-number reach improve collaboration and help provide a consistent user experience.
Ease of Management
Hardware, software and administration are all part of the service, which reduces your management burden. Support is handled by the service provider’s team of IT specialists, which often improves the speed and quality of support. Service provider data centers typically have more resiliency and redundancy than customer environments, making it possible to maintain high levels of performance and minimize the risk of downtime and data loss.
Additionally, UCaaS eliminates the headaches of managing multiple accounts with different providers and separate billing. Because you are dealing with a single vendor, UCaaS billing is a simplified process that consolidates all services across geographies. You also gain the flexibility to quickly scale services up or down according to business needs, paying only for what they need.
Connecting data sources across a network of multiple independent PBX systems is also a challenge, which creates problems for global contact center services. With UCaaS, a growing ecosystem of APIs enable integration with ERP and CRM systems, as well as many other key business applications. This gives agents ready access to the information they need to provide exceptional customer service.
Disjointed legacy communication systems are no longer practical for organizations looking to compete in the global marketplace. With a UCaaS solution, you can connect a global workforce through a single cloud platform while also cutting costs and reducing your management burden. Contact the business communication experts at IPC to learn more about migrating to a dynamic and flexible cloud-based solution.