The Top 5 Advantages of UCaaS Over Traditional Phone Systems

How streamlining communications into a single platform can improve productivity, facilitate collaboration, and cut costs

The average employee spends up to 20 hours a week using digital communication tools. And with numerous options available — like video conferences, email, phone calls, or text-based chat — keeping information streamlined is more complicated than ever. 

Unified communications as a service, or UCaaS, aims to solve this problem. These systems provide a single point of contact that unites multiple methods of communication, facilitating collaboration and enhancing productivity, all at a lower cost than traditional, internally managed communications platforms.

Here, I’ll get into why organizations are transitioning back to outsourcing their communication networks, as well as the many advantages of UCaaS and how your business can benefit.

The Circular History of UCaaS

For years, one company managed telecommunications in the United States: AT&T.

As a result of this monopoly, innovation remained slow. With no competition, there was no need to develop better technologies, and AT&T could increase prices as much as it wanted. In 1984, the U.S. government dissolved the monopoly, splitting it into smaller, separate companies and forcing them to compete.  With this dissolution, other companies started joining the industry, and you began to see more innovation within this space, as well as more competition for customer dollars. 

Then, in the 1990s, the internet exploded into the public consciousness, and more and more businesses started to use it as the backbone of their daily operations. In building their internal data infrastructure, they began investigating their communication infrastructure and realized that it ran on the same network. Companies asked themselves, “Why am I paying all this money to some third party when I could run my own communications network?” They started buying their own communication hardware and managing it themselves. Building and maintaining these systems wasn’t easy, but it was far less expensive than they were used to, so it was worth the investment.

Fast forward a few decades to the development and widespread acceptance of centralized email platforms like Microsoft Outlook and Gmail. These options provided a cheaper way for businesses to communicate by email over maintaining their own email servers. Companies flocked to these options because at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter how the email arrives in your inbox, just that it gets there at low cost.

Many of these companies realized they could also do the same for telecommunications. By unifying multiple forms of communication — voice over IP (VoIP), video conferencing, text-based chat, business lines, personal lines, cell phones, and even fax — these companies could offer a far more compelling package and sell it at a fraction of the cost of building and maintaining a bespoke system on-premises. 

And so we’ve come full circle. Many businesses that built their own internal telecommunications networks are leaving that headache behind and embracing UCaaS platforms to streamline their business processes. 

5 Advantages of UCaaS and Why You Should Switch

Even with the current rise of UCaaS, many organizations continue to use old phone systems to communicate and are reluctant to make the switch. While the migration process to UCaaS isn’t an inconsequential lift, there are several advantages of UCaaS that make the transition worthwhile. 

• More functionality: Even the largest and most successful enterprises can’t do what UCaaS vendors can with communication systems. Not only can they manage your phone systems, they can handle video conferencing, text messaging, and more. And their ability to scale is immense, providing options that suit businesses with just a few employees to massive call centers with thousands of phone lines. Because communication is the only service they provide, they have the focus and resources to make that service the best it can be for any business need. 
  
• Increased cost savings: With UCaaS, you won’t need to hire a team of highly skilled engineers to manage your communications network or the equipment to make it run. These companies will handle all of that for you, saving you much more money in the long run.
  
• Greater reliability: UCaaS companies operate with more redundancies in place, ensuring downtime is minimal.
  
• Greater flexibility: In a post-COVID workplace, remote and on-site employees rely on dozens of discrete forms of communication to collaborate. As long as you’re operating devices that are connected to the internet, UCaaS companies can unify them, ensuring you don’t need to purchase a whole new, separate, specialized system.
  
• Enhanced security: If you manage your own communications network on-premises, its security is limited by what your organization spends. However, many UCaaS companies are billion-dollar enterprises, so they have more than enough resources to invest in the tools and measures to ensure your data is safe. ​
  

What UCaaS Options Are Available?

Currently, there are four big players in the UCaaS industry:

• RingCentral
  
• Microsoft Teams
  
• Cisco
  
• 8x8
  

Which company you go with will come down to a number of factors, such as cost per user or included features. For example, Microsoft Teams might be better for organizations that rely on Microsoft’s suite of products and services, while Cisco might be a better choice to power a customer service call center.

We’ll Help You Get Connected

If you’re looking to transition to a UCaaS platform or want to bulk up your current communication infrastructure, Roundstone Solutions can help. We have years of experience aiding small businesses and enterprises in modernizing their IT and communication infrastructure and finding the best deployment solutions that fit their needs with the best vendors in the industry.

Ready to get started? Get in touch today.