UNIFIED MESSAGING BUILDING BRIDGES AND REDUCING GAPS

WHITE PAPER

Unified communications offers benefits which corporates, governments and individuals can realize to increase productivity, sales, network, awareness and reduce time to reach target market/individuals. As the analysts forecast in their respective reports, a large portion of unified communications market is yet untapped.

As unified communication remains yet to be completely explored and its implementation as organization wide single strategy is just taking shapes with few solution providers. Unified messaging becomes one of the key sub-strategies to be implemented by the organizations. Organizations need to look for service providers who can provide single platform for unifying all messaging needs across the organization to connect to employees, customers, sales prospects and other key stakeholders.

Unified messaging (or UM) is the integration of different electronic messaging and communications media (e-mail, SMS, fax, voicemail, video messaging, etc.) technologies into a single interface, accessible from a variety of different devices.

UNIFIED MESSAGING BUILDING BRIDGES AND REDUCING GAPS

Unified messaging solutions should offer freedom to its users even when they are mobile across voice, text and video services. The service providers need to innovate with mobile users' location/presence information (human or things) and should be pre-integrated withorganization's directory to unite communications across enterprise. The service providers should offer solutions which accelerate growth, boost innovation and reduce costs.

TechNavio forecast the Global Unified Communication market to grow at a CAGR of 15.85 percent over the period 2012-2016.

Gartner forecasts global business spending on unified communications infrastructure to be 20 billion by 2015.

Frost and Sullivan breaks the perception that unified communication & unified messaging are nosediving with social media and over-the-top data based instant messaging applications and explains increasing unified messaging trends in report Analysis of the Global Enterprise Voice and Unified Messaging Market, 2013.

Optimizing business processes

Corporate growth opportunities with innovation

Individual productivity & team collaboration

Reduce costs & increase ROI

A GOOD UNIFIED MESSAGING SOLUTION SHOULD IMPACT

The white paper describes how each of the area mentioned above will be enabled by unified messaging.

Optimizing business processes

These automated processes remove human latency, improve accuracy and enable faster decision making. Thus, providing much stronger ROI to many lines of business and vertical industries. Enterprises need to invest in platform which unifies all the communication mediums viz. voice, video and text and integrates with their varied IT infrastructure. A good solution should be able to integrate with IT systems and also get triggers from external human interfaces to stimulate actions on respective IT systems.

Today's competitive times have made each process in business very time-critical. Delay at any stage becomes a missed opportunity. Enterprises need approach whichhelps them streamline business processes and align employee as well as organization goals. Majortechnological advancements have made unifiedcommunications as one of the major contributors for organization growth. First step in implementing this strategy is unified messaging.

Unified messaging enables in optimizing the business processes by reducing the human latency that exists within a process flow. A simple example can be, production department has sent raw material requisition request to purchase department via ERP system. The purchase manager, is on leave and hence cannot approved the request. An integrated messaging system enables organization to auto send requisition request by SMS or IVR on purchase manager's mobile. He can view themessage and approve or disapprove the request via sending keyword to short code which is parsed &forwarded to ERP system. If the manager does not provide the necessary approval within a designated period of time then the business process would invoke a unified messaging service such as notify and respond from an SMS, IP PBX, voice portal/IVR, conferencing application, etc. or invoke escalation. Thus, these embedded unified messaging services would notify the person that they need to do something. If the person does notrespond to the notification then it can be escalated to a manager in the same manner.

This process is referred as Communication-enabled business processes (CEBP)Enterprises canimplement various use cases to automate and optimize their businessprocesses.

Few mentioned are

Alarms and notificationsBusiness work flow automationBusiness reportingFleet & vessel trackingStock portfolio alerts and confirmationsContact center and customer supportAgent less product trainingsInventory managementOrder processing

Corporate growth opportunities with innovationPeople communicate with each other through various media and over multiple communication channels. The corporates need to tap this opportunity and offer services and solutions which makes communication with their customers much simpler and less complicated. For example, a fertilizer manufacturer may want to reach his target audience in far areas of country. In order, to develop the region & understand the market potential their employee is required to be available in the market physically or may appoint a primary research organization. This whole setup will require quite a lot of investment in time and money. However, with a simple USSD/SMS based survey in local language can overcome this barrier with reduced time to research and even control costs.

The organizations in retail, manufacturing or service industry need to innovate the way they can reach their target audience, enable themselves to be more & more reachable by the customers. Corporates need to deploy more than one ways to be reached. The organizations can keep in touch with their customers, reach potential customers and bring brand awareness with unified messaging platform.

Deployment of unified messaging platforms will enable corporates to reach out new opportunities of offering their solutions and instill growth. A retailer in a shopping mall can promote it's products to people stepping inside the mall via SMS, flash messages or offer a video with MMS, which will entice people to take a look at the offerings. An integration between the location server, unified messaging platform and operator network will enable this promotion and make retailer expand its network of target audience. Easy to configure and integrated platforms will bring quick implementation ofstrategics and reap benefits.

Few growth opportunities and areas of innovation for the corporates can be

Innovative advertising campaigns with quick to implement contests and location based targets

Effective surveys & polls to reach larger target audience

Launch step-by-step guides to educate existing & potential customers with USSD implementation

Offer regular expert advice, offers and tips of use to existing customer to increase its value

Differentiate from competitor by opening multiple & easy to use communication channels viz SMS, USSD, IVR

With unified messaging platform and respective service providers, corporates can innovate and monetize on growth opportunities. Ease and innovativeness will always remain the key factors for sustainable growth and retain customers, with much lesser costs.

Individual productivity & team collaborationIncreasing individual employee productivity and team collaboration is one of the key factors which can transform organizations. Organizations need to work on strategies by enabling employees to save time in everyday activities through capabilities such as click to call and unified messaging. Employees can benefit from work flow automation, where they can access information, take actions via messaging and even get product trainings via IVR on their mobile handsets. This helps then leverage their time, even when they are mobile and hence increase their productivity.

The strategies can be extended for productivity improvements to workgroups through collaboration and conferencing tools, and generating significant cost savings through system consolidation, reduction in external communications costs, travel, and even real estate.

Reduce costs & increase ROIUnified messaging brings ease of communication, ease of accessing information and enable quick action irrespective of location for corporates employees & customers. This further leads to reduction of costs significantly. A leading telecommunications company in Europe estimates that saving just 30 minutes per week for each of its 1,500 employees amounts to $1.48 millionin productivity gains. By replacing and consolidating disparate voicemail and fax systems with Unified Messaging, companies can reduce the cost of voicemail by 20 to 60 percent.

ConclusionCorporates need to envision the need of unified communication and enabled processes for faster growth. Planning early for effective user adoption can open up a whole new world of benefits. One that includes increased sales, improved customer satisfaction and loyalty,improved vendor relationships, and reductions in costs, errors and waste.

Service providers need to innovate in terms of services and offerings which bridge gaps between the legacy and new technologies. The innovation in offerings can be built with innovative platform which unifies needs of communication and messaging and bridge gaps between organization, employees, customers, vendors and ecosystem. Service providers as well as corporates should invest in unified messaging platforms which bring value to the services and operations, with innovation, agility to respond to market needs and easily integrable with IT ecosystem.

TeleOSS Unified messaging VAS platformAruhat Technologies offers mobile VAS delivery solutions which are built on robust and scalable technology. The solutions are created to build bridges across complete MVAS messaging value chain by adding business value at each component. It enables each player in value chain to explore the business opportunities by facilitating launch of new services and new revenue streams.

TeleOSS

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ARUHAT TECHNOLOGIES PVT. LTD.

Aruhat Technologies Pvt. Ltd. was incorporated in the year 2004 in India with a vision of building technologies which enable business and serve enterprise customers by providing easily integrable software products and solutions.

Thus, building products and solutions which will enable our customers and partners to open new revenue streams and boost revenues with operational and business excellence. Aruhat is successfully moving towards product based solutions around its emerging technologies to serve and extend its business reach to the global marketplace.

Our suite of product/services solutions includes DataCrops - web data extraction platform, TeleOSS - VAS delivery platform and Openzki Open source IT services &solution platform.

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