Skype For Business
Skype For Business
There are a lot of consumers that feel like VoIP never quite lived up to the hype. VoIP suppliers often said their products extended the features of a traditional PBX -- but many times the tools simply weren’t capable of providing businesses everything they needed.
Then Skype for Business came along, fulfilling the promise of the Internet as a full-service communications pathway. Skype for Business is now housed under the Microsoft suite of tools. The addition of Skype for Business helped turn Office 365 into a full-service communications platform.
If you haven’t looked at the latest iteration of Skype, this article will share five of the best features of this VoIP provider who finally got it all right.
Skype for Business – Top Productivity Features
Skype for Business is different from the free Skype tool for individuals. It has a number of particularly useful features geared toward businesses of all sizes:
1. PortabilitySkype for Business travels with you. It works well across all of your digital devices, from the desktop to Android and iOS. You – and up to 250 of your colleagues -- can dial in from anywhere there’s a digital connection and engage in video, audio, and web-based conferencing.
2. Calendar IntegrationSkype for Business integrates with your Outlook calendar. This makes it simple to schedule meetings and stay on top of tasks. Skype for Business also has a web scheduler that summarizes upcoming meetings with notes reflecting topics and tasks. It also lets you join meetings from the web scheduler and invite others to join in.
3. Participant Control DashboardThe control panel for presenters puts you in the driver’s seat. You can mute individual attendees or block a person’s video if needed. If you’re in the midst of a meeting and forgot to invite someone, just ping him or her from Skype without ever leaving the conference. You can also set up a customized view of your Skype screen; there are four choices, from a compact tile view to the speaker view that lets you see the presenter on the screen along with their presentation.
4. Whiteboard ToolsImagine you’re in a meeting and you want to write on the whiteboard to illustrate your ideas or capture participant brainstorming sessions. Skype for Business lets you do that -- virtually. You can add notations to a whiteboard for participants. You can also poll your audience to get some real-time feedback. Or, open the floor to written Q&A’s while keeping participants on mute.
5. Recording and PlaybackEveryone misses meetings now and then, but with this Skype for Business feature, you never have to worry. Skype even lets you record all the component pieces of the meeting (video, audio, IM, whiteboard, etc.), or the entire thing, for later review. You can even pick your resolution settings for playback, including HD.
Skype for Business brings the power of video, audio, and more to your fingertips. We highly recommend getting to know this robust communications tool to improve the productivity of your office teams.
Why move to Skype for Business?
RIP ISDN, Long Live SIP
ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network) is the digital standard for communication of data, voice and video, and it’s being phased out. By 2025 SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) is the replacement that everything will be moved to. So what’s your business doing about it?
Moving to a hosted Skype for Business platform means your organisation is future proofing its communications as well as ensuring a better quality of service too; freeing you from a reliance on outdated copper wire infrastructure with a fast approaching use by date.
Device Agnosticism
This isn’t 2011 anymore; everyone in your business isn’t tethered to a Blackberry – in fact it’s incredibly rare to find a strictly uniform device policy within an organisation. Your communications solution needs to accommodate this. Hosted Skype for Business allows your employees to connect from anywhere – to anyone. Using the Skype for Business native app on iOS, Android, or Windows Mobile, Mac OS, Windows, or Linux, you can get connected quickly and easily, you can also simply use IP desk phones or headsets.
Geography Doesn’t Matter
When it comes to implementing hosted Skype for Business, geography doesn’t have to be a barrier.
Does your organisation have multiple locations? Great, a hosted Skype for Business solution allows for multi-site consolidation, whether mobile or not. Have offices in different countries or territories? No worries, you can easily establish short-routing of calls, a huge benefit when it comes to eliminating international call costs.
The Extras
With Novosco Hosted Skype for Business, it’s more than just the usual. Skype for Business is of course an award winning communications solution, but Novosco have packaged together other solutions into the platform for your benefit.
You’ll be able to take advantage of complete-control Call Recording and Monitoring, with supervisor level listen-in.
Analytics is one of the biggest buzzwords about at the moment, but we’ve been packaging a leading Analytics solution into our hosted Skype for Business for some time, for all our customers. Your business can keep track of all the information you need. Aside from allowing for some pretty nifty data presentations at board meetings, this also empowers organisations to manage their service and adjust as and when required. Have 60 lines but only really using 40? No problem, it’s simple to scale down (or up!) whatever your requirements are. Can you see that customers are spending an unacceptable length of time on hold? Good to know, because now you can work at fixing that and maybe your call protocol needs reviewed.
Accurate analytics allows you to take a really hard look at your productivity and procedures, which can ultimately only be a positive thing.
Unified Communications Contact Centre
When it comes to customers contacting your business, it’s safe to say that they rarely look for just one way in. With Novosco Hosted Skype for Business, the Anywhere 365 integration allows a whole host of communication solutions to integrate together; social, web chat, calls and emails, video, custom app chats, and more. Communications should never be a blocker to your business’s growth, Novosco gets this and our hosted Skype for Business solution delivers this.
Hands off or on approach
We manage Hosted Skype for Business for many of our customers, because we have the experience and the expertise, it’s what we do. We don’t know what your specific business is, perhaps you’re in finance/public sector/zoo keeping/ice cream flavour design [delete as appropriate].
We know what our business is though. If you require us to manage your Skype for Business services, we can. Adding and removing users, setting up new calling structures or locations; we can handle it all for you. You’re choosing Hosted Skype for Business to improve your business, so why add new challenges alongside it? Novosco can architect Skype for Business to integrate with your Office 365 and Active Directory and anything else you might need – or, should you wish to handle all of this yourself, there’s a self-provisioning portal which makes it as simple as possible for you to control.
And there’s more…
The features available to users of Novosco Hosted Skype for Business are diverse indeed; Queue Management, Dialogue Intelligence, CRM, Skills Based Routing, Screen Sharing & Recording, Call Quality Monitoring (and Automation), and more. Much like a Christmas selection box; there’s something for everyone.
Every business has their own needs and requirements, so we accommodate for that.
Comments
Post a Comment