The Office

Enabling the mobile workforce

The worldwide adoption of mobile devices like smartphones and tablets is shifting the business practices of most organizations from the older concept of job-on-site to a more flexible remote-worker idea. Studies indicate that a sizeable workforce of most organizations is using mobile devices to connect to the corporate network, as well as for accessing cloud services, in order to conduct their day-to-day business. The new active hub of businesses is slowly becoming wherever their workers happen to be, and according to a recent Forrester study, 66 percent of employees use two or more devices for work activities each day.

Vodia's built-in mobility features are designed to overcome the challenges of device agnosticism by providing secure and reliable access to the company resources-anytime, anywhere, on any device-regardless of whether the device is owned by the company or the employee. Vodia's enterprise mobility functionality allows your workforce to become more productive by eliminating travel times and giving them the freedom of bringing their own devices (BYOD), which ultimately reduces the equipment costs for the organization. With Vodia PBX now your employees can access the full suite of your Vodia communications platform using mobile devices of their choice, from any location (office, home, hotspots), and on any network (WiFi , 3G/4G, or cellular).

Key Benefits

Reduce costs with BYOD. Reduce equipment costs for your organization by adopting Bring you own device (BYOD) schemes. Your employees can stay connected to company communications at all times using their own fixed or mobile devices, whether connected through the Internet or telephone network.

Boost productivity. Less travel time means more time spent on business tasks. Why have your employees go through long commutes when they can stay equally productive outside the office. Boost productivity of your organization by providing your employees with the independence and flexibility to stay connected to company communications from anywhere, anytime.

Improve customer satisfaction. Improve service levels and customer satisfaction by interacting with customers in real time whether in the office or on the road. With advanced find-me/follow-me functionality, you can be sure customers are directed to the most suitable agent even when they are not in the office.

Accelerate sales. Closing a sale has a lot to do with customer confidence. Customers appreciate one-call resolution and timely response to inquiries. An integrated mobile workforce can greatly contribute to sales closures, solving problems, responding to urgent requests more efficiently and building customer satisfaction. Earning customer confidence can ultimately win more sales, service calls and contracts.

Remain competitive in your industry. Enterprise mobility is not just a buzz-word but a necessity for the modern day enterprise. Adopting current technology trends keeps your organization at the cutting edge of best business practices and keeps you business processes up-to-date helping you maintain an edge over your competition.

Enable timelier decision making. Improve coordination and build a better business by providing your employees with the flexibility to communicate and collaborate with other employees, partners, suppliers and customers regardless of location and time. Enable quicker decision making, save time and avoid unnecessary costs incurred due to job delays (e.g. service level agreements (SLA) penalties).

Build a professional image. Enabling your mobile employees to call customers with your central corporate number or their individual department's number from their personal mobile devices builds a sense of professionalism and improves customer perception. Receiving calls on your advertized business number and redirecting calls to off-site employees ensures 24/7 availability and accelerated response time for the entire organization.

Keeping existing workflows

Since the introduction of the private branch exchange (PBX) in the 1970s companies have become dependent on many features that were introduced over time.

Businesses don't really care about the underlying technology. What we see today is the virtualization of the hardware PBX. Employees and employers expect that the features of the PBX that they learned to use as a production tool are available also in software product:

Business cards are printed with extension numbers on it and people know how to use it. People in the company expect that they can talk to colleagues by calling them up on their extension number. Employees know how to hold calls, know how to transfer calls, how to park them and how to get them back.
The phone in the office is an impersonal device. Callers are rather calling functions, not persons. Call redirections take care about holiday absence and even employees joining and leaving the company. This demands a central switching function which is provided by the PBX.
The inclusion of cell phones has gone far beyond the simple redirection after timeout. Modern PBX systems like the Vodia PBX are able to provide a full feature set including hold, transfer and conference also on cell phones. Employees on the road can significantly increase their productivity with callback lists or being part of an ACD group. Employees benefit from the fact that the caller-ID presented by the PBX is the company caller-ID, not the private number of the employee. User acceptance is increased by the definition of service hours where the PBX includes cell phones in extension calling.
As with most other IP-based services, employees are able to use the PBX service from anywhere in the Internet where they can communicate with the PBX. This may be the open Internet, but also smaller parts like VPN and LAN/VLANs. This makes it possible to have highly mobile employees.
Callers may not like it, but are used to line up in ACD queues. Critical resources may be allocated in a very efficient way, and calls can be distributed automatically to the next available agent. Hunt groups are used to distribute calls in groups.
Paging helps to broadcast messages into the company or groups. This makes it simple and productive to look for employees, send out reminders, or issue warnings.
Intercom is a quick way to send short, bidirectional messages between two parties inside the company without having to type anything.
Shared lines were used in the beginning of the PBX to deal with multiple people using the same telephone line. Over time it has become a simple way of transferring calls inside small organizations. Vodia PBX is able to emulate the behavior or shared lines with snom phones, although the underlying technology has completely changed.
A close email integration of Vodia PBX forwards voicemails and fax messages, sends out notifications and daily reports on the system usage. Administrators get proactive reports about the activity of the system and if parameters should drift out of the green zone.
Integration with other systems, for example Microsoft Lync saves employees time to figure out which colleagues are busy on the phone and which ones are able to communicate. Simple add-on tools that can start a web browser on incoming calls make it easy to integrate with web-based CRM tools, or dialing out of applications that support TAPI (for example Microsoft Outlook).
Vodia PBX generally encrypts traffic, so that intruders have a hard time getting access to sensitive content. In addition to that, it has mechanisms to fend off attacks coming from the outside or inside of the company in order to shut down the service or gain unauthorized access to the system.
The Vodia PBX software embraces latest technology for the virtualization of hardware. This makes it possible to keep calls up even if the underlying hardware fails.

Vodia PBX is an economical choice not only because of its low maintenance costs; what is even more important is that the people working in the company can be as productive as possible when it comes to telephony.