Unified Communications Featured Article

Vonage Meets Customers Where They Are

By Paula Bernier
Executive Editor, TMC

Productivity has always been important to business. But lately it seems to have taken on even more urgency.

Perhaps that’s because organizations always want more out of their investments. And people represent their greater cost center.

The push to increase productivity may also be driven by the fact that productivity has flat lined.

CNBC last month reported that U.S. unit labor costs increased faster than initially thought in the fourth quarter amid weak worker productivity. The good news is that worker productivity in the fourth quarter was better than initially reported. The bad news is that worker productivity was unchanged in the quarter, instead of declining at a 0.1 percent rate as reported in February.

This creates an opening for companies that sell business communications, collaboration, and productivity tools. And one way companies in these arenas are working to help organizations improve productivity is by bringing communications and collaboration capabilities to the business systems that workers use today.   

For example, customer service reps and sales people tend to spend time using CRM systems like Salesforce. So rather than requiring them to exist those systems and open a different application to interact with a colleague or customer, integrated solutions add collaboration and communications to CRM and other popular business systems.

Vonage (News - Alert) is among the companies helping to enable this kind of integration.

The company recently released a new version of its Vonage Integration Suite. It connects critical business applications with Vonage’s unified communications and collaboration offerings using a single connector interface.

“The Vonage Integration Suite offers a better overall integration experience with advanced contact management services; greater call control and note-taking features; customizable integration tools; and robust in-app help and support,” Vonage explains. “Coupled with the Vonage Business Cloud platform, the integration suite enables businesses to empower employees, elevate their customer experience, and achieve better business outcomes by integrating with CRM, collaboration, and business productivity applications into one cloud-based unified communications platform. And, since the new integration suite was built using the Vonage integration platform, the company is able to extend these same improvements to the Vonage Enterprise offering.”