6 Remote Communication Tools Trends Driving Forward Modern Workforces

Remote communication tools are more than a quality-of-life improvement for your business. A fully integrated UCaaS system lets your employees communicate effectively, saves you money, and gives your business the flexibility it needs to be competitive.

Why are unified communications taking off? And what’s driving the push for streamlined B2B mobile ecosystems?

The answer has much to do with promoting collaboration in the face of an evolving workforce.

And the numbers don’t lie:

• A Stanford study found that employees who act collaboratively stick to their tasks 64% longer than solitary employees.
• One study found that companies who promoted collaboration were five times as likely to see high-performance results.

The real challenge businesses face is creating a collaborative environment compatible with current employment trends. So, what’s driving this change? Here’s what you need to know:

1. The Need for Remote Communication Tools Grow as More Workers Go Mobile

We’ve all seen the high-profile IPOs of freelancing marketplaces like Upwork and Fiverr. More and more employees are making the transition to mobile work. Now more than ever, businesses must find effective remote communication tools and collaboration methods within the new modern work dynamics.

Streamlining remote team communication suites and maintaining productivity is a real challenge many businesses face.

So, how do you solve this problem?

You implement a UCaaS remote communication solution that prioritizes the end-user experience.

There’s no avoiding the shift to remote work. An estimated 52% of all workers and 90% of knowledge workers are mobile. Companies should embrace this changing trend, seeing it as a valuable opportunity to discover new talent, improve employee morale and productivity, and as a way to reduce operational expenses.

A UCaaS remote platform is the go-to solution for enabling employees to communicate, collaborate, and adapt to potential challenges in real time, eliminating the need for lengthy text threads, email chains, and non-stop catch-ups to stay on top of work.

2. Collaborating Long-Distance with Coworkers

Employees can easily collaborate as long as they’re connected. Remote working communication tools allow employees to sync time zones, videoconference, and even edit the same documents simultaneously.

There’s no technological barrier to long-distance collaboration for remote workers.

However, it would help if you emphasized the importance of secure collaboration and communication to employees. Sending work documents over Facebook or collaborating over unsecured platforms is dangerous to the company.

Ensure that employees understand that all work topics and conversations should occur over secure, private company lines and platforms, no matter how trivial or unimportant.

Poor security practices can easily take down a company. Equifax, for example, was hacked because its password management was poor. Over one hundred million Americans have been negatively affected by the preventable hack. A UCaaS platform is a safe, secure, and reliable way to keep your teams in touch.

3. Top Communication Tools for Virtual Teams Allow Platform Integration

While UCaaS provides many essential features in one platform, your UCaaS software may not be the only one you use workplace-wide or even for a single task. No problem. Many software solutions allow for the integration of third-party services via API.

Your IT and development teams can “pull” the needed features and services and integrate them into your central communications platform and workflow.

4. Ensure Business Continuity With UCaaS

Business continuity is not merely a technological challenge — it’s also a personal one. New technologies take time to master, and many people resist unlearning old technologies and learning new ones.

Disregarding new technology existed way before remote work and will continue to exist with each transition and improvement in remote work practices and procedures.

The most crucial step to ensuring business continuity is properly training your workforce. Your employees must understand why you’re implementing new workplace changes, the benefits they can expect by adapting to new workflows, and how their daily work will improve.

Incorporate Feedback when Incorporating New Remote Communication Tools

A secondary, but still significant, step to ensure business continuity is to ask for feedback and provide updates to employees. This will ensure that no only your workforce is being listened to, but also you will gather insights into what could be improved to a successful deployment.

Great ways to incorporate feedback into your remote communication tool implementation:

• Surveys
• 1–1 interviews
• Anonymous suggestions mailbox
• Data collection such as heatmaps, click maps and journey clips

Adapting to new technology can be challenging for some, as we all learn differently. Some are visual learners, while others prefer listening lecture-style to process new information.

When employees can access help through documentation, online videos, or their IT department, they’ll better adapt to technological changes.

5. A Real-World Example of UCaaS In Practice

Here’s an example of how a UCaaS-branded softphone works in a real-life setting — a great story to share with your employees during the transition.

Say “Company A” uses traditional wired telephony, while “Company B” has already implemented unified communications through a branded softphone.

Company A’s employees may feel lost when lead developer John works remotely. They may ping him on Slack. But what if John is away from his computer and his phone doesn’t send notifications for Slack? Scenarios like this are common with remote work.

And yet, these scenarios are easily avoided with a UCaaS platform that prioritizes user experience and collaboration.

Company B’s employees have better relationships with remote workers as they collaborate to produce the best work possible.

Their branded softphone solution ensures every team member receives push notifications that are accessible immediately because the system is fully synced with their smartphone.

They have no trouble connecting to discuss essential project milestones, bounce ideas off one another, and communicate effectively during crunch time. When they have questions, someone is always within reach.

6. Remote Communication Tools Benefits on the Mobile Workforce

You can’t expect your workers to produce high-quality work when their collaboration systems are broken and inefficient. Counterintuitive communication platforms can hurt your productivity and innovation.

Benefits of a Cloud-Based UCaaS Remote Communication Tool:

• Save your business money.

Say goodbye to outdated wired telephone systems or a series of SaaS subscriptions. UCaaS streamlines all of your communication tools for remote teams into one convenient platform.

Your employees can talk, text, video conference, share files, and more from any device that can run the branded softphone app that you custom build for your business. You can also save money by:

• Decreasing physical costs such as ending leases on server spaces, moving costs, and physical upkeep.
• UCaaS’s main advantage is that it offers all-in-one platforms for telecommunications work. By bundling all these features and services, businesses, especially small businesses and entrepreneurs, can save on operating costs instead of purchasing access to individual features.
• Having employees work from home or remotely means you no longer require large office leases or have generic expenses like pens, staplers, and office equipment.
• Reducing office utilities like power, water, electricity, and more.
• Limiting IT support costs. While IT support is crucial for employees to complete remote work or telecommunication, you can outsource much of that IT support work to your UCaaS platform provider. Your internal IT can now focus on providing support for work devices and generic work processes instead.

• Help you fully embrace remote work.

Your employees want to work remotely. Remote collaboration tools let you embrace this change without sacrificing productivity and team cohesion. Your employees can work from anywhere and maintain outstanding productivity.

• Scale as you grow.

It’s incredibly easy to scale your collaboration suites as you add new employees and departments and expand your business’s operations. You just add new features with the click of a button to facilitate these changes.

• Give you insight into valuable analytics.

You’d be surprised at how much you can learn from employee and customer feedback. Best communication tools for remote teams have various analytics options, allowing you to understand your users, their needs, and how they interact with your branded softphone app.

• Internalize all communications in one platform.

Most companies rely on several apps to communicate, which isn’t a practical solution. The quickest way to improve productivity is to streamline all your remote communication tools in one convenient location.

• Build your VoIP app in just hours.

VoIP apps are becoming more affordable. And the best news? With Cloud Softphone, build and provision your app in just a few hours, and you’re good to grow.

Enhance Team Productivity and Collaboration with Cloud Softphone

Thinking about implementing a branded softphone to improve collaboration and team cohesion?

Acrobits provides third-party and white-label access to Cloud Softphone clients, a UCaaS solution for businesses that need Android and Apple support, fast provisioning, A/V quality control, smart contacts, and more.

Cloud Softphone is the ideal remote communication solution for businesses that want access to premium VoIP services with a rich set of features, advanced encryption that can securely handle sensitive information, and the ability to scale your branded softphone as you grow.

Book your demo today

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Knowing these and other terms and definitions regarding remote work will ease the transition from physical offices to virtual workspaces.

Read more: VoIP: The Ultimate Guide.