How Centralizing Communications Delivers the Power of Simplicity

As businesses adapt to the realities of the COVID-19 pandemic and the need to support a work-from-anywhere (WFA) business model, they understand more than ever the power of simplicity. For example, the recent Work from Anywhere study by Avaya found 71% of businesses would prefer to have all their collaboration tools with one provider. After all, a single provider makes life easier by eliminating the complexity of managing separate tools with different interfaces and admin strategies.

A single provider also simplifies updates and consolidates consulting across the communications infrastructure to enable faster resolution of issues. Most important, simplification and consolidation of communications and collaboration tools enables IT to focus on more strategic tasks by eliminating the need to deal with integration and performance challenges caused by disparate technologies.

Simplicity of a cloud-based collaboration platform

While most companies would prefer all these advantages, making them real has proven challenging. In the wake of the pandemic, 77% of companies are rethinking the employee experience and 52% are increasing the priority of collaboration software. Yet many are still reassessing existing technologies and using only band-aids to fix immediate communication issues like having a simple video platform.

Most leading companies, however, have viewed the current disruption as an opportunity to retool, rethink, and reimagine – seeking new ways to empower at-home employees to stay connected, increase their productivity, and engage customers more effectively. An HBR study found that knowledge workers have actually been more productive working from home, and Facebook, Microsoft ,and other companies have announced plans to make wide availability of WFA permanent.

Many such companies immediately recognized that quick fixes to multiple, unintegrated, and overlapping solutions would only create more issues over the long term. Instead, they found that a comprehensive, fully integrated, cloud-based communications platform could deliver the simplicity they want, the features and capabilities employees need, and the rapid time-to-value the business demands.

The simplicity of a cloud-based solution starts during deployment. With a solution like Avaya Cloud Office by RingCentral, for example, deployment can be done remotely, without a single vendor or partner representative visiting the office, making it a simple and safe process – and the platform is fully provisioned within minutes of subscribing. Avaya Cloud Office integrates calls, chat, meetings, and collaboration on a single platform, letting employees communicate and work – reliably, seamlessly, and securely – anywhere at any time across any channel.

With Avaya Cloud Office, on-going management, troubleshooting, and consulting can be accomplished with the same simple, hands-off approach. The service is even compatible with the existing computers and smart phones already in use. Although, if a company requires new desktop phones, they can be shipped directly to employee homes and easily connected to the platform by entering a short code on the handset.

From cost center to strategic investment

Offering a single platform that increases productivity and powers innovation, Avaya Cloud Office is available as a subscription service, so instead of facing a huge new capital outlay, a company can benefit from a manageable month-to-month operating expense. The subscription service also enables a company to test the platform with a limited deployment for a team or project and then, if the results are positive, instantly scale the number of licenses, which can be increased or decreased on demand.

In addition, the shift to a subscription model moves the communications budget from a “keep the lights on” expense to a strategic investment in innovation. For the same subscription price, the solution gets updated automatically and continues to provide new capabilities that enable employees to work smarter and more productively.

The benefits of Avaya

An Avaya Cloud Office subscription can power communications and collaboration services for your entire global enterprise. Migration is simple, and the service includes automated updates and 24/7 award-winning support. The solution’s open platform, APIs, and webhooks provide more than 100 integrations with business cloud apps, including Google G-Suite, Microsoft Office 365, Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Zendesk.

With its legacy of innovation and great customer experiences, Avaya works side-by-side, mile-by-mile as a partner to ensure customers achieve the simplicity and uptime they require. For example, Avaya handles more than 1.5 million service requests annually and resolves 91% of outages in less than two hours. Gartner has named Avaya a leader in unified communications nine times and RingCentral a leader in unified communications as a service (UCaaS) for five years in a row.

To learn why companies are exploring how Avaya Cloud Office by RingCentral delivers the power of simplicity, read more about the changes resulting from remote work in the Avaya Work from Anywhere report.