Welcome to Ask the Experts, brought to you by CloudServicesUniversity.com. In this video, In this video, Star2Star Communications’ Senior VP of Sales Skip Lane discusses the top five UCaaS features driving efficiency, productivity and cost savings for your customers. Find out more about unified communications from Skip and the Star2Star team here: http://star2star.cloudservicesuniversity.com/
| Skip: | Hi, I’m Skip Lane, Senior Vice President with Star2Star Communications, and I run the master agent channel and wholesale channel. We’re going to talk a little bit about the advantages of unified communications. The second question that I was posed today by Intelisys is, “What is your take on unified communications as it relates to Star2Star and our featured functionality?” |
| The first is having full presence. In a UC environment, the end-users and your client can see when all of their employees can come off hook, and whether they’re on the phone, or not on the phone. Are they available? Are they online? That equates to, if you will, less call backs, less voice mails left. “Oh, that person’s ready for a call. They’re off their phone. I can call them or I can chat with them.” A full presence. And this goes for all locations, so anyone in any company organization can see if anyone is online, on the phone, on IM. Anywhere in the world, at any time, real time. A huge increase in productivity and efficiency for all employees that use the UC service. | |
| Second is the ability to set up an on-the-fly audio conference. You can literally bring in people on an audio conference call, real time. Usually in the case of Star2Star, this is no additional charge, which saves the company money, and increases efficiency because it is real time. People can dial right into a bridge. | |
| The third is instant messaging or chat. You can chat with anyone–again in real time, anywhere in the world–in your organization. You can see if they are available and they’re online. And you have a complete chronology of all the chat logs. So, if you needed to go back and see when someone said something to you three days ago, “Hey, I remember the answer, but I can’t remember exactly who sent that, when they sent, or what were the specifics wrapped around that content.” You have those chat logs logged and stored in the storage files for easy access. | |
| The fourth thing would be having Click-To-Dial and Outlook integration within your VoIP services so that you can literally pull in your contacts, click on a contact. If I needed to call Andrew Pryfogle, I could just pull them down out of my Outlook and click on his phone number. And immediately the phone starts ringing without me having touched my phone set on my desk, or having launched my Softphone on my PC, or my mobile application on my iPhone or Android. | |
| The next feature around UC, I think that people need to wrap their heads around that’s a huge potential cost savings for your clients, is web conferencing that is built into most VoIP platforms. Star2Star is finishing development on a very unique web conferencing platform that is fully integrated into our framework, as well. That’s due out in the third quarter of this year and it’s going to be a huge seller. We also have in the UC family, video conference, that is live today. We have that; you can have up to 12 to 15 different people–depending upon bandwidth–launched on an immediate video conference in the organization. Or external to the organization, as well. | |
| So those are the top five UCaaS features that we see that customers are asking for that drive efficiency, productivity and cost savings within the unified communications environment. | |
| Thank you, and if you have additional need for information around UC, please refer to the microsite with Star2Star on the Intelisys’ website. Thanks for joining! |
