How to integrate all your digital tools into one solution

The upheavals of 2020 meant we all had to adopt new ways of working, with new tools to do the job. Pretty soon those collaboration tools became the mainstay of our working lives. 

Tactical changes that businesses made on the fly now have the power to become a positive, permanent force within the workplace. By seizing the opportunity that hybrid working brings, organisations are opening up new avenues to serve customers and deliver better employee experiences. 

In April 2020 almost half the UK working population was operating from home offices. There was a huge uptake in collaboration tools to help employees stay connected and support productivity. 

24% of all small businesses adopted or increased their use of digital tech to support those homeworkers, according to The Federation of Small Businesses. Now it’s time to make sure all those new tools and apps are fully integrated to support employees however and wherever they’re working. 

One app in particular has become essential to many organisations: Microsoft Teams. 

Its use had grown by 894% by June last year. 

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Microsoft Teams is just one of the many tools out there to enable better collaboration in a hybrid working world. 

As the number of apps you use across your business builds up, inefficiencies can also creep in. Logging in and out of apps constantly isn’t just inconvenient, it can eat up valuable time. 

That’s why a solution that can integrate seamlessly with all the different tools out there can make all the difference. With a plan chosen for each individual employee’s needs you can make collaboration possible anywhere, any time. 

A feature-rich unified communications and collaboration app can seamlessly join it all together, delivering calls, meetings and team collaboration essential for today’s businesses – all in a single app. 

Combining your communications with your business apps in one place means everyone can work smarter, not harder. So you can build bridges rather than silos across your organisation, bringing together the tools you already use and making them available from one easy-to-use touchpoint. 

There’s no need to invest in hardware or software updates as colleagues can simply access everything they need from their smartphones, laptops or devices. And as developers constantly unveil new integrations, a solution’s integration ecosystem is always expanding.

There are countless business benefits that come with seamless collaboration too. 

Making sure that your colleagues can connect and collaborate on any device wherever they happen to be brings an obvious productivity boost. People can find and share content easily without having to switch between apps and data, which means they can get more done. 

Some unified communications and collaboration apps also come with features like interactive whiteboards to brainstorm and generate ideas, so employees can innovate and create new solutions. 

But there are wider benefits too. As Shawn Achor from the Harvard Business Review points out following research at KPMG: 

“Happiness raises nearly every business and educational outcome: raising sales by 37%, productivity by 31% and accuracy on tasks by 19%.” 

The right approach can also help you stand out as an employer. 

82% of millennials have said that workplace technology would influence whether they accept a job offer. 

And with millennials making up 75% of the workforce by 2025, offering an integrated choice of apps and collaboration tools will help you attract and retain top talent in future.

It’s not just your colleagues who are affected by the tech choices you make. Your customers will be too. 

With joined up collaboration tools your colleagues can have all the data they need about a customer at their fingertips. So when they’re dealing with a query, for instance, they can see the customer history and make informed decisions on how to help. 

75% of customers say they’re more likely to purchase from a company who knows their name and purchase history and recommends products based on their preferences. 

By providing a truly personalised service, your colleagues can generate new business and enhance customer satisfaction. 

Along with enhanced productivity, it’s important to choose a solution that’s flexible enough to scale up as business needs and budgets dictate, with end-to-end encryption to make sure that you don’t lose sleep over cybersecurity. 

So you can enable smarter, joined up hybrid working with confidence. 

Want to see how you can integrate all your apps and data into one convenient work tool?