According to Dawn Wood, Business Executive for Interactive Intelligence at Atio, unified communications (UC) improves communication between companies and their customers by providing easy access through multiple communication channels such as voice, e-mail, video telephony and web interactions. She says, "Setting up a UC system is relatively quick and largely depends on the number of users. Training staff on the UC system is also easy and quick as it uses existing and familiar technology such as the phone, e-mail, internet and fax."

Gartner defines UC as "products that enhance enterprise productivity by enabling and facilitating the user's management of enterprise communication systems and the integration of these systems with business processes".

"These products may be made up of a stand-alone product suite or a portfolio of integrated applications and platforms," says Gartner.

Wood says, "UC are the result of the convergence of all communications on Internet Protocol (IP) and open software platforms." Components of UC include live communications, unified messaging and web interactions.

"Although UC can improve customer service, its return on investment (ROI) is difficult to calculate and recognize because you cannot always associate revenue with the loss of an interaction in the back office," she says. 

Gartner predicts that as IM and e-mail evolve, it is likely that live IM attempts that are unsuccessful will optionally be rolled over to an e-mail store, in the same way that a live phone call will optionally be rolled over to voice mail.

"IM chains can then be archived in the same store as e-mail, making IM information easier to reference, search and log for compliance purposes," says Gartner.

Wood says, "Although IM has rapidly evolved into a useful business tool in some parts of the world, South Africa IM is not widely accepted as a business tool but mainly for social interactions."

"The integration of audio, web and video conferencing in a single converged conferencing solution is possible to deploy in an organisation at a reasonable cost," says Gartner. "These converged solutions allow users to choose the form of conferencing they wish to use." According to Gartner, making this sort of flexibility available to all employees can result in major shifts in interpersonal interactions and collaborations, and can lead to productivity improvements.

"Unified messaging UM), which is the integration of e-mail, fax and voice, is particularly convenient for mobile business workers like sales people because it enables them to reach customers and colleagues through a PC or telephone," says Wood. "Users can listen to their voicemail and e-mail messages while driving their cars or at home 24/7. Some services offer worldwide telephone access." She, however, feels that South Africans are not taking advantage of all UM technology available possibly due to limited access and cost.

Wood says, "UM requires discipline from users in managing their messages in order to reduce the chances of messaging overload, which can affect system storage and productivity as too many e-mail messages may result in an employee spending too much time trying to go through each message and leaving high priority messages unread. There are tools available within the UM system that can be used to prioritise messages."