People are a company’s biggest expense. Wages, benefits, payroll taxes, training and equipment expenditures account for as much as 70 percent of total business costs. However, successful businesses understand that employees are also their most valuable asset.
Employees’ knowledge, skills and experience enable companies to provide goods or services. Moreover, employees are the face of the company and directly influence public perception of the brand. Three-quarters of consumers say they will stop doing business with a company after a single bad customer experience.
This is why it is no stretch to say that the best way to deliver great customer experiences is by creating an excellent employee experience. A happy and engaged workforce is all the more essential in an era of the great resignation, quiet quitting and crippling skills gaps.
Improving Flexibility and Balance
While salary and benefits obviously contribute to employee satisfaction, there’s more to it than that. People also want more personalized guidance from managers, a better work-life balance and more flexible work schedules. A well-executed unified communications strategy can facilitate all of those benefits.
UC facilitates flexible work models by allowing employees to remain connected, share ideas, solve problems and coordinate efforts from any location using a variety of communication channels. Real-time audio and video conferencing with features such as remote desktop control, file sharing, screen sharing, public and private chats, and virtual whiteboards help ensure a cohesive workforce.
Managers can leverage the technology to build stronger relationships with their team members. UC features offer multiple avenues for soliciting employee feedback, sharing advice and information, recognizing achievements and more. This can improve the employee experience and increase retention by making employees feel respected, valued and invested in the company’s success.
Implementing UC technology can be demanding, however. The process of integrating multiple communication and collaboration technologies presents significant technical challenges. Getting real-time audio and video right can be particularly hard, frustrating employees with jittery, grainy videos and poor sound quality. One study found that more than half of all help-desk tickets were related to UC issues.
Removing Communications Friction
Cloud-delivered UC-as-a-Service solutions allow organizations to enhance the employee experience while offloading the implementation challenges. With UCaaS, businesses don’t have to worry about implementing, configuring and maintaining a complex assortment of hardware and software components. Instead, they get on-demand access to those resources from a provider with specific expertise in communication and collaboration solutions.
From the employee perspective, UCaaS delivers a consistently high-quality experience with a minimal learning curve. All the features and functions that users require can be accessed through a single interface. Plus, since UCaaS is hosted in a provider’s data center with redundant infrastructure, employees usually find that voice and video communications are very high quality with rare service interruptions.
UCaaS can also make life easier for employees by eliminating application sprawl. During the transition to remote work, ad hoc adoption of collaboration apps often led to fragmented communication environments. Many employees were using multiple tools that weren’t always compatible with those used by coworkers and business partners. One survey found that remote workers were switching back and forth between as many as 15 different conferencing apps every day, contributing to high levels of stress, anxiety and exhaustion.
Standardizing on a robust UCaaS solution ensures reliable communications across multiple devices and locations. That reduces frustration and contributes to a more engaged, effective and satisfied workforce. Contact us to learn more about using UCaaS to enhance the employee experience in your organization.
