The changing business communications landscape after the pandemic

The pandemic created a significant need for small businesses to pivot to cloud-based communications, specifically Unified Communications. Unified Communications, or UC, encompasses cloud voice systems that create a complete, end-to-end collaboration experience. Robust Unified Communications solutions incorporate carrier-grade infrastructure with access to advanced telephony features like call forwarding, call routing, IVR, call recording, call analytics, AI, custom hold music and more.

For many SMEs, finding this solution requires seeking third-party advice to understand the do’s and don'ts of implementing Unified Communications solutions. We saw many customers needing support on utilising their existing software licences further, adopting tools like Microsoft Teams and Cisco Webex.

This need for cloud-based connectivity hasn’t gone away. However, we have seen that the requirement for our customers to ‘get back to business’ in brick-and-mortar businesses like Medical centres and Retail stores has prioritised an actual telephony experience beyond simply switching on Microsoft Teams.

To unpack what you require in a business communication system, several questions are worth asking. Typically we ask our customers if they are:

• Managing dual phone systems?
• Do they have long call-wait times?
• Are they unable to take calls via your Microsoft Teams accounts?
• What remote working/hybrid working policies do you have in place?

This helps us to determine their core requirements and how they can tie back to business outcomes.

Most businesses still didn’t have an optimal Voice solution in place. Although they may have started during the pandemic, there was still work to implement a robust, reliable business communication and team collaboration strategy. We understand that small to medium-sized businesses require uptime reliability and consistent customer and employee satisfaction, which has become our key focus at Essential Tech.

Introducing ET Voice, our Voice and Unified Communications Solution. We have developed a best-in-class solution built on Microsoft and Cisco.

With this solution, we can support your business further with whatever Voice and Telephony experience you require for your organisation.

Protecting your business with reliable Voice technology.

It’s not uncommon that small to medium-sized businesses don’t have the optimal Voice or VoIP technology in place to mitigate against security threats. This has become a critical focus for most businesses in recent months, and it’s another reason why partnering with a specialist Voice/VoIP provider gives our customers the confidence that their phone systems and cloud-based collaboration tools are safe and secure.

Unified Communications solutions, such as ET Voice provisioned through the SASBOSS™ platform, have inbuilt security features that protect your business. Some of these features include:

• Safe and secure VoIP calls – including TLS encryption at end-points;
• User access permissions and controls – no unnecessary access to features that could share or leak essential data;
• Monitoring of fraudulent activity through platform logging – versus low-visibility in standard VoIP or telephony systems;
• Avoiding data leakage across multi-tenancy and the use of hypervisor to separate and divide cloud tenants in the same data storage facility; and
• Compliance with NDB and GDPR – Unified Communications solutions often give visibility and data on files transferred through Voice systems, allowing compliance to be achieved.