Small and mid-size businesses have always been short on one job category: administrative assistants. That’s why unified messaging — technology that deposits messages from all points of contact into a single, electronic, easily accessible inbox — is so liberating. Employees are more productive and easier to reach when they can control communications with clients and vendors through a single inbox.
Unified messaging, in some form, has been around for years. But now, providers are adding mobile phones to the services they can link to a single electronic inbox. They’re also tailoring services to small and mid-sized businesses — which might be reason enough for you to consider unified messaging if you haven’t already, says Sanjeev Aggarwal, vice president of infrastructure solutions at AMI-Partners, a technology research firm.
“Unified messaging needs to be an important criteria for businesses looking for new solutions,” Aggarwal says. “I think the first thing is just receiving e-mail and voice mail in a single mail box. Once they get that, start looking at text messaging and SMS capabilities.”
Leave the office, stay in touch
Employees today don’t necessarily work the same schedule in the same office every day and leave work behind when they go home. Unified messaging makes it easier to work from anywhere at anytime. Employees can receive e-mail, fixed-line voice mail, mobile voice mail, mobile text messages and faxes online or through one phone call. Before, checking all five channels of communication required two phone calls, one trip online, and a trip back to the office to check the fax machine’s paper tray.
“Having access to a fax or having access to a key e-mail or having access to one of your customers from your cell phone and being able to get that from anywhere you dial into is another highly productive feature that enables a small business to appear larger, more efficient and more productive,” says Ron Comerford, AT&T business marketing product manager. AT&T is one such company that offers a unified messaging solution for small and mid-sized businesses.
Keep work flowing
Not only can employees check for messages on any communication channel, but they also can respond via the most convenient channel. In other words, if you log into your unified messaging inbox and hear a voice mail on your office phone, you can respond via e-mail or phone. If the content of the message is important to someone else, you can forward it. And if you want to listen to it later when you’ll be away from an Internet connection, you can save it to your desktop.
Respond to customers faster
Conventional wisdom holds that a responsive company keeps its customers. Unified messaging makes that goal much easier to accomplish.
Imagine that you’re on the road when an upset customer leaves a voice mail on your office voice mail. With unified messaging, you can immediately learn about the customer’s problem and address it now — not when you get back to the office two days later to discover that the customer has taken his business elsewhere.
Save money
Unified messaging may be an ideal add-on to voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) service, which has become a popular money-saving way for small and mid-sized businesses to bundle their data and voice connections. And many providers offer hosted VoIP and unified messaging solutions so companies don’t have to maintain the systems locally.
“For the smaller companies, less than 20 employees, they can access the same type of functionality without having those complex systems on premises,” Aggarwal says. “They can go with a hosted voice service that provides some unified messaging.”
A few caveats
As you’re shopping for a unified messaging solution, remember these key caveats:
Not all solutions offer the same features. Some will integrate mobile lines, while others will not. Not all offer features such as text-to-voice and voice-to-text transcription.
Not all solutions offer true integration with Microsoft Outlook or other e-mail clients. You may need to set up your unified inbox to forward messages to Outlook if you want to access them there.
Hosted solutions will keep all of that electronic data on their own servers — to a point. After you use up your allotted disk space, you must remove messages and archive them locally. Image files (for faxes) and audio files can take up quite a bit of disk space, so be sure you’re able to invest in some extra storage if you’ll need it.
