For years now, one of the buzzwords in telecom technology has been "Unified Messaging." To begin with, let's take a look at messaging in the late 1990's to understand the problem that Unified Messaging addresses. There you are in 1999 driving to your appointment. Your customer calls you in the office and leaves a message in your voice mail. Your coworker calls you on your cell phone and leaves you a message. Meanwhile, your boss sends you an email asking for your quarterly sales forecast and he needs it by the end of the day. We have all these ways for people to contact you, but all the information is going to different places. You leave your appointment and check your cell phone voice mail. You call into the office and get your voice mail from the office phone system. When you return to your office at 4pm, you get your email informing you that the boss wants his sales forecast by 5. Your customer that left you a voice mail on the office phone system is mad because you did not respond quickly enough. Do you see what the problem is here? We have all these ways to communicate, but no way to manage it. It is a liability having to be responsible for messages on your cell phone and your office voice mail. Customers get your cell phone number and call you there instead of the office and run up your bill. You are getting time sensitive emails when you are out of the office and cannot respond quickly enough.
Unified Messaging allows you to manage all of your communications in one place. With a smart phone such as the iphone or android, you can be directly linked to all your communications wherever you are without even having to be in the office. There are a number of different technologies in play here. With voice mail to email, your emails are all converted to an audio file and sent to your email. You can now listen to your voice mail messages in the same place you are checking your email. Instead of having to listen to your voice mail messages sequentially through the phone, you can skip ahead to the more import messages. This feature is sometimes called visual voice mail. You can check your email right from your phone or from your home computer or ipad. No matter where you are, you are now getting all of your communications delivered directly to you in your email inbox.
Then there is the problem of customers leaving you messages on your cell phone and on your office voice mail. Unified messaging solves this by giving your customers one number to call to contact you. You do not have to give out your cell phone number. You have a DID number which stands for direct inward dialing. When your customer calls that number your desk phone and your cell phone ring simultaneously. If you don't answer the call then the call is redirected to your office voice mail so that your voice mail messages are only going to one place. You no longer have to provide your cell phone number to your customer. It is much simpler and efficient and you get the added bonus of saving on cell phone costs by no longer having customers call you on your cell phone when you are in the office and could have taken the call on your office phone.
The blackberry solved the problem of getting your emails when you are out of the office. With the advent of "cell phone integration" with your business phone system, the problem of having two points of contact was resolved.
Does anyone still send faxes anymore? I try not to. It seems like such a hassle. Nonetheless, unified messaging addresses faxes as well! You can also assign a separate DID number for faxes. Just like your DID number for your voice calls, this DID is your own personalized fax number. So now your faxes come directly to you, instead of having to walk down the hall to the fax machine and sift through a pile of papers. Like your voice mail messages, the faxes are delivered to your email inbox wherever you are! All of your communications - voice, fax, & email are delivered directly to your email inbox which you have access to via your smartphone wherever you are 24 hours a day. Besides the savings in cell phone costs, think about how much more efficient it is to manage all of this from one place!
If you would like more information about how to implement Unified Communications for your business please feel free to contact me:
Adam Stern
www.absphones.com
410-239-2227
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