We used to live in a desk-bound business world dominated by desk phones, printers, and fax machines. Now we operate in an increasingly mobile environment where text is often people’s first mode of communication. Voice and video are table stakes. And newer capabilities like team messaging are increasingly popular, in addition to the many applications that you already integrate and manage in your enterprise.
Maximizing productivity is a powerful driver, putting pressure on traditional enterprise communications infrastructure to strategically unify organizational objectives, IT initiatives, customers, partners, and teams— across geographies and offices. There is also the demand to drive down costs and deploy more resources to help the rest of the business, not just support IT projects.
This is the context in which Collaborative Communications is transforming organizations. Below are three benefits we see driving the transition to Collaborative Communications in 2018.
Collaborative Communications enables seamless experiences.
Collaborative Communications enables teams, customers, and partners to work the way they want by providing open, intelligent workflows to create seamless experiences for disparate teams both within and outside the organization.
Team messaging is at the center of Collaborative Communications. It is the focal point not just for one-to-one chats or even team conversations, but rather a collective of team messaging, file sharing, tasks, and more. Today a call may be a secondary step, as many expect to ping first, call after. With Collaborative Communications, this can occur within the same channel, in the same mode and workstream, so that you don’t have to switch between applications and can work with far less friction. This approach takes instant messaging or texting to the next level and within the business context, makes it seamless for teams large and small to collaborate in real-time. Additional capabilities of Collaborative Communications solutions include voice, video, online meetings, app integrations and more.
Collaborative Communications supports your mobile, global workforce.
To be effective in a global workplace, your various offices and workforce must all be in sync, no matter where they’re located. In essence your company needs to find ways to operate in unison, just as it did before you had a distributed or international presence. Unfortunately, it’s easy for your company to lose track of critical business when it has time and distance standing in its way. This is especially true when dealing with legacy equipment that was not built with today’s mobile workforce in mind.
With the vast majority of people now using their mobile devices to stay connected to their work, the idea of a 9-to-5 workplace has changed. For many people, the work environment is now fluid; limited only by the number of reception bars on their wireless devices. This rise in workforce mobility creates new business communications challenges. And keeping pace with today’s global and mobile workforce requires companies to reevaluate their current business communications systems to meet the changing needs of on-the-go employees.
Collaborative Communications addresses these challenges head on. Businesses can operate across geographic boundaries with one cloud communications and collaboration system.
Collaborative Communications enables intelligent workflows that reshape business processes.
In the age of the cloud, the traditional boundaries between application types begin to fade. There is no reason why you shouldn’t be able to move smoothly between looking up a customer in a CRM tool, calling a contact, sharing a file, starting a video chat, or messaging a virtual team. Collaborative Communications is an open and intelligent conversational platform that supports integrations, chatbots, and AI. For example, with our RingCentral solution:
- Gmail integration enables users to flow a conversation from email to a call from their RingCentral number, send a text message, and share their online presence.
- Smart links of Salesforce records are available within a messaging window, and there’s a click-to-call integration from within Salesforce.
- Intelligent chatbots relay information back and forth between a Collaborative Communications hub and Salesforce, Trello, Asana, or Twitter.
- Alexa Skills allows users to check and respond to voicemail, make calls, or send and receive SMS text messages with any Alexa-powered device.
Progress is now.
We believe 2018 will be the year more enterprises embrace Collaborative Communications, empowering their workforces to work anytime, anywhere, on any device, and within the applications teams use most. It’s good for companies on the whole, and the benefits touch every facet of an organization.
To learn more, view the video from my presentation at ConnectCentral 2017, RingCentral’s annual conference.
Originally published Jan 17, 2018, updated Jan 30, 2023
