Unified Communications (UC) Platforms

The year 2012 is the target time frame of a majority of European organisations unified communications (UC) platforms, according to a recent survey. Aspect, a vendor of UC technology, surveyed 237 companies located in 13 European countries on their UC plans and perceptions.

UC is the integration of real time communications like telephony, instant messaging, video conferencing, and speech recognition with non-real-time communications like voice mail, email, and even faxes. The idea is to simplify and integrate communications forms to make businesses run more smoothly. Clearly, UC is of great interest to the telemarketing industry.

Currently, however, only 17% of the survey respondents actually have a UC platform. The main goal of having a UC platform is improved employee productivity, cited by 22% of respondents as their main perceived benefit of a UC platform investment. Telemarketing is in a constant state of pursuing productivity increases, and UC platform investment is one popular approach.

However, the UC platform adoption across European organisations is not coordinated due to the economic climate of the past few years, so the realisation of these gains is not yet proceeding in a universal fashion.