Tags: collaboration software

Three Principals for Effective Hybrid Communications and Collaboration

Posted by Bryan Williams on Posted in Cloud, Contact Center, Customer Experience, Education, Enterprise, Government, Healthcare, Hospitality, Servers and Storage, Unified Communications Tagged , , , , , , , , , ,

Succeed with the New Hybrid Work Model

It’s been called everything from the “biggest shift to how we work in our generation” to “the new norm in 2021,” and many are sure it is here to stay. One thing is certain ― preparing for the new era is a business imperative.

One aspect of hybrid work is certain—the need for communication and collaboration tools that support continued productivity and business operations. Over 70% of executives expect to raise spending in this area, according to the PWC study. But along with the technology, you’ll need a vision for how your business’s hybrid work model supports communications and collaboration.

What is a Hybrid Work Model?

Let’s first define and examine the component parts of a hybrid work model—one that supports any and all combinations of worker types while ensuring no lapse in communication and collaboration either internally or with customers.

Your company’s breakdown of worker types will be different from that of companies in other industries, and the mix of worker types will constantly shift. Employees with shorter tenures may be required to start as in-office workers, while experienced veterans may find Work-From-Home (WFH) makes them more productive. As employees change roles, their work location may shift, and there is no doubt that worker types will evolve along with it.

Worker types could include:

  • In-Office Workers
  • Employees who choose to work at a remote location (such as coffee shop or library)
  • Work-From-Home Employees
  • Workers who are part time in the office and part time at home
  • Workers in Transit (working on the go)

The Keys to Hybrid Success

Designing a communications and collaboration solution for your hybrid work model shouldn’t be difficult, and won’t be if you keep three principals at the forefront: Flexibility, Business at the Center of All Communications, and Crazy Simple Communications and on-line meeting tools.

Flexibility

A hybrid work model requires your solution to stretch and expand, ebb and flow as the model takes shape and changes. Hybrid work isn’t a static concept—by nature it implies that where people work will change over time, so your communications solution has to embody elasticity.

Employees should be able to quickly and seamlessly collaborate with each other regardless of their physical location. Elastic communications technology doesn’t care about “where.” Location of either employee or customer is a nonissue. And it needs to be a central feature of your hybrid work model. Elastic communications and contact center solutions also support the unpredictability of a hybrid work model—when employees decide to move to a rural location where your business doesn’t have an office, customers and employees can still reach that employee without awareness of the move. A cloud-based contact center and unified communications allows your business to engage and support customers, no matter where agents or employees may be.

Keep Business At The Center

When your hybrid work model communications technology puts your business at the center of all communications and collaboration, customers reach you the same way they always have. Your business phone number doesn’t change, nor do your employees’ business phone numbers. Employees should never have to share personal phone numbers, because their business phone travels wherever they go. And all communications should be unified in the cloud such that you or your IT leader can measure, secure, and manage them regardless of location.

Management capabilities should let you add phone lines for unexpected growth or remove them when no longer needed. You should enjoy one console to manage permissions, set up hunt groups, set up auto attendants, and more, regardless of employee and customer locations.

Crazy Simple Communications & On-Line Meeting Tools

Let’s illustrate a bit further what we mean by “crazy simple,” at least for your communications and collaboration technology. One suite of tools should deliver all that you need—a business phone system with desktop and mobile applications, the ability to conduct virtual meetings with video, webinar, contact center solutions, security, chat capability, even secure and easy file storage and productivity applications. A central, single management platform and a service record that makes deployment easy. Uptime so good, so reliable, that the system rarely goes down. One system that delivers on whatever communications and collaboration need your employees may have, wherever they are.

NEC UNIVERGE BLUE CLOUD SERVICES – Designed for Hybrid Working

Flexible, business-centric, simple communications and collaboration technology is what NEC’s UNIVERGE BLUE offers. A cloud-based unified communications and collaboration platform, UNIVERGE BLUE CONNECT enables users to be more productive and share ideas and content though a single system, regardless of location. CONNECT seamlessly integrates all your communication tools—desktop and mobile phones and computers voice; video conferencing, on-line webinars, and chat; secure file sharing, and contact center— into one easily manageable solution oriented around your hybrid work model and its employee’s needs and workstyles.

Are you ready for the world of hybrid work? Don’t waste time and money on servers, app install, and security patches. With NEC’s cloud-based business productivity suite, your business is your focus, not your IT. UNIVERGE BLUE CLOUD SERVICES can help define your hybrid work model and ensure your employees have the tools they need to work better, from wherever they might be.

Contact Us Today

Please let us know if you have any questions or concerns. Fill out the form, and we will get back with you.

Enabling Long-Term Continuity with Feature Rich On-Line Meeting Solution

Posted by Jennifer Elting on Posted in Cloud, Contact Center, Customer Experience, Enterprise, Government, Healthcare, Hospitality, Servers and Storage, Unified Communications Tagged , , , , , , , ,

In March 2020, many began working from home and relying on remote meeting tools to communicate and collaborate. During this time, most organizations’ focus was just to keep their business up and running until employees were permitted to go back into the office. Organizations kicked into survival mode, some quickly implementing solutions that were intended to be a temporary fix until things went back to normal.

As time goes on, it is clear the business world will likely not “go back to normal” for the foreseeable future, and possibly never will. Now for some, the swift adaptions implemented because of the crisis have proven only to be effective for a short period of time, and not sustainable as long-term solutions.

The spread of COVID-19 has led to a rapid shift in how employees and customers communicate. Now, organizations must start thinking purposefully about redesigning their business operations with the right collaboration tools that will help to enable a sustained future. The future now depends on an organization’s ability to adapt their business by rethinking business continuity and resiliency plans.

Rethinking Business Continuity

Before the pandemic, many organizations associated business continuity with operations and services in the wake of a disruptive event, such as disaster recovery. Now, we realize that business continuity and resiliency go beyond just disaster recovery and disaster planning. Now, business continuity means that employees have the tools and resources to do their jobs from anywhere at any time.

To ensure that productivity happens from anywhere, the tools must be easy to use, always available, highly secure, mobile-ready, tightly integrated, and well supported. NEC UNIVERGE BLUE CLOUD SERVICES makes this possible.

Embracing Digital Collaboration Tools to Enable Business Continuity

"Business as usual” may have changed. What we consider “an office” may have changed. But what hasn’t changed is the need to keep doing what we’ve always been doing, and that means keeping employees connected and engaged, providing great customer support, and winning new business.

Feature rich online meeting tools allow employees to collaborate with their colleagues as effectively as they would in a physical office and meet with prospective customers to pitch their products and services – from anywhere.

While video collaboration and/or voice is a great start, businesses cannot sustain by only utilizing video collaboration and phone calls as their primary communication method. Other features are necessary such as team chat, webinar, file share and sync, co-editing, phone calls, screen share, and more.

Introducing UNIVERGE BLUE® MEET WEBINAR

UNIVERGE BLUE MEET WEBINAR is an online virtual event service that provides a complete set of tools and capabilities to help grow business virtually and reach more people, wherever they are located.

Presenters can use video, audio, and screen share to effectively communicate with customers and prospects no matter their location. MEET WEBINAR helps to build personal connections, engagement, and trust by allowing attendees to see the presenter in real-time and engage through Q&A, Emoji’s, live Polls and more. Organizations can reach a broader audience and grow their business with an easy-to-use service that connects and engages anyone, on any device, from anywhere.

Streamlining communication complexity is the key to improving remote collaboration, enhancing security and productivity, as well as saving time, finances, and resources. It’s important that employees and customers don’t lose the power of face-to-face meetings while remote. The good news is they don’t have to! With NEC’s UNIVERGE BLUE MEET WEBINAR, employees have access to powerful online meeting and virtual collaboration tools to help keep business moving forward, no matter their location.

With UNIVERGE BLUE MEET WEBINAR you can:

  • Promote webinars with customizable invitations, registration pages, and email reminders
  • Host webinars with up to 12 HD video presenters and up to 1,000 attendees
  • Record sessions and report on who viewed the recording
  • Generate detailed reports on attendance, performance, chat, polls, Q&A, and surveys; follow up with emails and surveys to push attendees down the purchasing funnel
  • Integrate with 1,000 + business apps via Zapier to track your leads, registrations, and more!

NEC’S UNIVERGE BLUE CLOUD SERVICES incorporate a variety of cloud-based communications, collaboration, and backup solutions. Whatever kind of challenge has been imposed on your business; NEC can help you figure out the solution.

If you are interested in learning more about NEC’s UNIVERGE BLUE MEET WEBINAR On-line Meeting solution, visit https://www.univergeblue.com/cloud-services/webinar/ or get in touch with a UNIVERGE BLUE expert today.

Reach Sky-High Communications with UNIVERGE BLUE

Posted by Stoney Reynolds on Posted in Cloud, Education, Finance, Government, Healthcare, Hospitality, Retail, Unified Communications Tagged , , , , , , , ,

Businesses today are rapidly migrating to the cloud. But with upfront costs, unforeseen challenges and the process of getting employees up and running, transitioning to the cloud can feel daunting at times. In fact, 50% of IT professionals say that lack of skills is the top challenge their organizations face in adopting cloud-based infrastructure.

What if there was a simple and reliable solution that could help you transition to the cloud?

Meet UNIVERGE BLUE® CLOUD SERVICES. NEC’s UNIVERGE BLUE provides customers with a frictionless, comprehensive and enhanced set of fully integrated, cloud services ranging from integrated phone system, video conferencing, messaging and contact center to backup & disaster recovery.

UNIVERGE BLUE is completely customizable, with no one-size-fits-all solution. So, no matter where you are on your cloud journey, UNIVERGE BLUE is here to fit your unique business needs.

Your Business is Constantly Evolving – So Should Your IT

How we communicate in the workplace has changed significantly over the last decade thanks to rapid advancements in technology. Communications technology was forced to evolve in order to support the growing number of remote employees across the globe. Even before the current COVID-19 pandemic, the ability to support a remote workforce was already becoming a top priority for many businesses.

However, the COVID-19 pandemic has provided a new perspective on the importance of being able to adapt at a moment’s notice. In just a relatively short period of time, technology teams were tasked with addressing remote users, enabling multiple devices, building out new locations, implementing cross-channel solutions and more.

On-premises hardware simply cannot keep up. As the world continues to change and business needs continue to evolve, businesses need a solution with the flexibility to adapt and grow with them.

Don’t Fall Behind Because of Your IT

Maybe you’re experiencing increased operational costs for overhead and maintenance. Or, perhaps you’re struggling to balance multiple technology solutions spread across various locations and are at risk of your infrastructure becoming complicated, unmanageable and outdated.

And, further complicating things is security. As the number of detrimental data breaches continues to grow, many IT teams are becoming saturated and overwhelmed with risk management and they could be struggling to keep up.

Read our latest ebook, ‘Reach Sky High Communications’ to learn more about how NEC UNIVERGE BLUE can provide you with a simple and reliable path to the cloud.

Transition to the Cloud with NEC

UNIVERGE BLUE is designed to meet the needs of business of all sizes. Whether you’re a startup of 10 employees or an enterprise of thousands around the globe, NEC specializes in providing flexible options for every type of business.

With UNIVERGE BLUE, business can achieve the following:

  • Remove internal barriers to communication and scalability
  • Keep up with ever-increasing customer demands
  • Connect employee engagement with customer satisfaction
  • Enable remote employees to be efficient and connected
  • Automate maintenance and updates
  • Protect organizational data and reduce risk

UNIVERGE BLUE not only meets your needs today, but it will grow with you and provide a comprehensive solution for the future. It’s time to reach for the clouds with NEC’s UNIVERGE BLUE CLOUD SERVICES.

Contact Us Today

Ready to get started on your journey to the cloud? Schedule a demo and speak with one of our cloud experts today!

Why Unified Communications Is Essential to Remote Work and Business Continuity

Posted by Stoney Reynolds on Posted in Cloud, Contact Center, Enterprise, Unified Communications Tagged , , , , , , , , , , ,

As business leaders implement new policies for returning to work, they are also reevaluating plans for enterprise resilience. The COVID-19 pandemic and shutdowns caused businesses to react quickly, testing their agility and ability to recover. During this stabilization period, there will be a pivot towards flexibility and improved business continuity plans for the “next normal.”

Business Continuity While Working Remotely

No one could predict that organizations would have to quickly embrace remote work due to the potential spread of employee illness. As a case in point, a Gartner Business Continuity survey revealed that only 12% of organizations felt that their business continuity plans were prepared for the impact of COVID-19. Without these plans in place, revenue has been affected, some businesses have shuttered, and others are unable to reopen.

With the continuation of the pandemic and the uncertainty of a vaccine, 74% of CFO’s are planning to permanently shift to remote work in order to manage costs. The onus is now on IT and security leaders to consider what employees need to successfully work from a remote location so that business can continue as usual. Leaders are looking to cloud-enabled services and unified communications to minimize future business disruption and support remote collaboration.

Built on NEC’s award-winning infrastructure, UNIVERGE BLUE® offers affordable services to ensure business continuity and employee productivity and collaboration while working remotely.

Why Unified Communications is Essential for Business Continuity

Remote work and telecommuting options have steadily been increasing, with 159% growth in the past 12 years, driving an increase in UC implementation. As some organizations were considering unified communications before, there is now an added benefit of increased business continuity and disaster recovery, post-COVID-19.

Moving to a UC solution takes services such as telephony, file storage sharing, video conferencing, contact center and data backup to the cloud so they are accessible from anywhere at any time. Cloud-enabled services create an additional layer of security to real-time work processes, guaranteeing availability beyond weather events or pandemics. Systems and collaboration tools remain available to remote work locations, often at higher speeds, to enable workflow and increased productivity outside of the normal office environment.

Since the unexpected impacts of the pandemic, work and team collaboration have been changed for good. It is imperative that a disaster recovery plan account for remote work options. Organizations must include UC in their contingency plan to be agile and continue business as usual.

Remote Collaboration and Effective Communications

As more employees are expected to work from home, remote teams must find new ways to work together. Unfortunately, remote communications can be easily distorted or misinterpreted with delays and a lack of physical and social interaction. Another frustration is when remote teams choose ad-hoc services, creating more complexity, security holes and maintenance challenges for IT and security teams.

Streamlining communication complexity is the key to improving remote collaboration, enhancing security and productivity, as well as saving time, finances and resources.

It’s important that employees don’t lose the power of face-to-face meetings while remote. The good news is they don’t have to! With NEC’s UNIVERGE BLUE® MEET Video Conferencing solution, you and all of your colleagues have access to powerful virtual collaboration tools to help keep your business moving forward—even when employees aren’t in the office.

What’s more, NEC is giving MEET Video Conferencing and Collaboration to existing customers and new UNIVERGE BLUE® customers for FREE for the rest of the year!

*Some Restrictions Apply*

Responsive Remote Contact Center

One of the challenges with remote work is continuing to provide a high-quality customer experience. Implementing unified communications optimizes contact centers, offering increased control and simplified maintenance through a single platform. Instead of working through multiple tabs or applications, contact center agents are more agile, with one interface to handle customer needs efficiently, from anywhere at any time.

Contact center performance can be measured through monitoring, recording and analytic reporting. The use of unified communications for contact centers also allows for easier scalability and deployment for remote workers. With a streamlined remote contact center, organizations can hire agents in any location and ensure top-notch customer responsiveness.

Secure Disaster Recovery

No business continuity plan is complete without secure backup and recovery to manage and protect critical proprietary information and data. Working remotely can increase security and compliance challenges, as sensitive data may be stored unencrypted on remote workstations, especially if there is no singular platform for accessing company resources.

When moving to cloud-enabled services for responsive communications or collaborative work practices, IT and security teams require simplified and more secure data storage. The cost-savings of implementing a secure, cloud-enabled data backup and recovery platform also include ongoing access to the latest hardware and software without the need to maintain the infrastructure or personnel.

Why Choose NEC UNIVERGE BLUE® for Remote Work and Business Continuity?

The new remote work challenge for IT and security teams is managing multiple types of software, infrastructure and other platforms across many locations. UNIVERGE BLUE offers secure, cloud-enabled unified communications and collaboration solutions that are fully integrated, scalable, cost-effective and easier to maintain than on-premises hardware. The streamlined communications platform improves employee and customer experience with secure access from anywhere for team collaboration and a centralized hub for information.

NEC also offers a phased approach and flexible delivery model for organizations moving to unified communications. Consider UNIVERGE BLUE solutions to:

  • Improve remote employee productivity and collaboration through greater mobility and communications
  • Reduce IT costs through integration with other cloud-based applications and simplified management
  • Reduce risk with secure, compliant data backup and recovery

Contact your NEC Account Manager or visit the UNIVERGE BLUE website to learn more.

What’s New with UNIVERGE BLUE? Now Announcing General Availability for U.S. Partners

Posted by Marc Hebner on Posted in Cloud, Contact Center, Education, Enterprise, Finance, Government, Healthcare, Hospitality, Retail, Unified Communications Tagged , , , , , , , , ,

Last month, NEC announced the launch of the new generation of our UNIVERGE BLUE™ cloud communications portfolio.

Today, I am extremely excited to share that UNIVERGE BLUE CONNECT and ENGAGE are now generally available for NEC’s U.S. Business Channel Partner Community. This is phase 1 of a global rollout during 2020 that will ultimately include partners around the globe by 2021.

What is NEC UNIVERGE BLUE™ CONNECT and UNIVERGE BLUE™ ENGAGE?

Businesses need the ability to communicate and collaborate from anywhere at any time, both internally and externally. They need tools that are easy to deploy and use, and provide users with an integrated experience. The need for a flexible and adaptable solution to support a remote workforce will extend beyond the current COVID-19 pandemic and we built this solution with this in mind.

UNIVERGE BLUE CONNECT and UNIVERGE BLUE ENGAGE are born-in-the-cloud solutions designed specifically for businesses of all sizes and the channel partners who serve them. Built on innovative and proprietary technology, the solutions are elegant, reliable and easy to deploy, while remaining highly scalable and extremely cost-effective.

Our cloud-based unified communications platform, UNIVERGE BLUE CONNECT, combines a full-featured cloud-based phone system, team chat, video conferencing and online meeting plus file backup, sync and share, all available to users through desktop, web and mobile applications. CONNECT helps improve the communications and collaboration of businesses, while being easy for channel partners to sell, install and support.

Our fully featured Cloud Contact Center as a Service solution (CCaaS), UNIVERGE BLUE ENGAGE, combines robust functionality with carrier-grade reliability and world-class deployment and support services. It’s designed to fit business needs from the small, single channel to the large and sophisticated omni-channel environment, and can help any business differentiate from the competition where it matters most – the customer experience.

Brought to Market Exclusively through NEC’s Business Partner Community

NEC prides itself on its commitment to building strong relationships with our channel partner community and delivering true innovation, and our new generation of UNIVERGE BLUE strengthens this commitment.

Last month, we spoke with industry analyst Elka Popova, Vice President at Frost & Sullivan, about the news. “NEC has the opportunity to accelerate the conversion of its vast and entrenched customer base to cloud services such as UCaaS, CCaaS, meetings, and file sync and share,” said Popova. “The partnership will also greatly improve NEC’s and its dealers’ competitive positions as they will be able to capitalize on the ongoing customer migrations to cloud services. This will result in new revenue opportunities, more predictable revenue streams and stickier customer relationships for NEC and its channel partners.”

Available today through NEC’s Business Partner community, UNIVERGE BLUE CONNECT and ENGAGE complement NEC’s existing offerings, while creating new opportunities for partners to earn increased revenue through new programs designed to facilitate deeper customer relationships.

NEC Channel Partners can choose between three different go-to-market models:

  • Customer Ownership
  • Revenue Share
  • Agency Model

The Customer Ownership and Revenue Share models are now available for Channel Partners located in the United States, with the Agency Model being available in June. For NEC’s loyal Canadian Channel Partners, a launch date will be announced very soon.

Here’s What Our Partners are Saying

NEC gave a handful of exclusive partners early access to UNIVERGE BLUE CONNECT and ENGAGE. The partners were able to test the product first-hand and get it in front of select customers. In just the past month, NEC has received overwhelmingly positive feedback. Here’s what they had to say:

  • “Forerunner Technologies is extremely excited about NEC UNIVERGE BLUE CONNECT and the NEC/Intermedia relationship. Our clients have a pent-up demand for this dynamic delivery model and the migration to the cloud with advanced collaboration applications. This model is unique in comparison to other UCaaS offerings and allows Solution Integrators better ability to control the end user experience while keeping costs in line. Congratulations to NEC on this move!” – Paul Diesu, CEO of Forerunner Technologies

  • “We’re excited to take part in the full launch of the new NEC UNIVERGE BLUE! This will be a turning point in the future of NEC UCaaS solutions and sales, and looking forward to presenting the fresh new look to our current customers and new prospects.” – Scott Ellman, Director of Sales, Advanced Communication Solutions

  • “NEC Blue delivers a complete public, private and hybrid cloud offering to NEC SI Partners. The NEC Blue allows the SI to deliver this offering in an Ownership, Revenue Share or Agency Model. NEC Blue Team provides Inside Sale Support, Marketing and technical support to the SI, allowing the SI to engage in any opportunity. DTC has engaged NEC Blue Team in multiple call center opportunities. NEC Blue can provide a simple to very advance call center solution. A truly SI centric model.” – Gordon Maccani, President, Digital Telecommunication Corp

I couldn’t be more excited for NEC and our partners as we deepen our roots in the UCaaS and CCaaS markets and help our customers transition to the cloud. So come join us, it’s going to be a fun ride! For more information on UNIVERGE BLUE CONNECT and ENGAGE, visit http://univergeblue.com. Or, if you’re interested in learning more about our Channel Partner Program, reach out to us via the form below.

Become a Partner

We welcome your interest in our products, solutions and services. If you have any questions about the Channel Partner Program, please submit your query below.