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Towner Communications
Towner Communications on Staying Relevant in a Changing Industry
Towner Communications’ Julie Towner on Staying Relevant in a Changing Industry
Acquisition and a willingness to embrace new market opportunities have been the keys to growth for third-generation, family-owned Towner Communications. The company started as a television repair company in 1965. Today it is a thriving B2B telecommunications company. Tune in to hear Julie’s story and her advice for growing your business.
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Unified Communications & Collaboration and Why Should I Care?
What Does Unified Communications and Collaboration (UCC) Mean?
Unified Communications and Collaboration (UCC) integrates communication forms like voice, video, and data services with software applications. This creates a cohesive environment that enhances business processes by making it easier for employees to connect, collaborate, and communicate effectively.
Key Components of UCC Include:
- Instant Messaging: Real-time text communication between individuals or groups.
- Presence: Knowing whether a contact is available, busy, or offline.
- Unified Messaging: The ability to retrieve all messages (voicemail, email, SMS) from a single inbox.
- Conferencing Applications: Tools for connecting large groups to share information and ideas seamlessly.
- Teamwork Applications: Software that supports collaboration on group projects.
- Video Conferencing: Enables video communication across PCs, mobile devices, and room-based systems.
- Mobile Applications: Extends UCC capabilities to smartphones and tablets, ensuring communication continuity.
The Impact of Unified Communications and Collaboration
In today’s hyper-connected, always-on business environment, organizations face unprecedented pressure to operate swiftly and efficiently. Quickly finding the right people, accessing vital data, and exchanging information can determine your business’s success.
Unified Communications and Collaboration addresses these challenges by enabling more intuitive and efficient connections. UCC simplifies connectivity and improves business processes by uniting real-time and historical communication, like voice, video, and data services, into one environment.
Three Major Benefits of Unified Communications and Collaboration
Adopting a UCC strategy offers three significant benefits that can dramatically enhance employee collaboration and productivity:
1. Reduce Time Wasted
UCC provides real-time presence information across your organization, allowing employees to see their coworkers’ availability instantly. This feature reduces communication delays, enabling faster decision-making by helping you reach the right person quickly. According to a study by Frost & Sullivan, companies that implemented UCC solutions saw a 15% reduction in time spent on daily communications.
2. Connect Geographically Dispersed Employees
With businesses increasingly operating on a global scale, UCC is essential for bridging geographical distances. In Mid-Missouri, where teams are spread across Jefferson City, Columbia, and beyond, UCC enables real-time collaboration without in-person meetings. This capability ensures that your top talent, regardless of location, can contribute effectively to projects.
3. Provide Freedom of Choice for Maximum ROI
A comprehensive UCC strategy enables a mobile-first, any-device approach, letting employees choose their preferred communication methods. With BYOD policies on the rise, Columbia and Mid-Missouri businesses find that UCC reduces Shadow IT risks and boosts productivity. Gartner reports that companies adopting mobile-first UCC strategies see a 25% increase in employee satisfaction and engagement.
Proven Results of Unified Communications and Collaboration
Studies continue to show that UCC helps organizations save time and money by improving communication efficiency. For example, seamlessly switching between communication methods, like turning a chat into a conference call, greatly enhances information exchange. Organizations that implement UCC solutions reduce expenses related to employee downtime, travel, and mobile work by an average of 43%.
A Nexus study found that over 60% of firms using UCC save three hours a week per mobile worker. For Mid-Missouri businesses, this adds up to 12 extra hours of productivity per employee monthly—time for growth and innovation.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) for Columbia and Jefferson City Businesses
Unified Communications and Collaboration (UCC) is more than just a technological upgrade—it’s a strategic initiative that can transform how your business operates. For companies in Jefferson City, Columbia, and across Mid-Missouri, implementing a UCC strategy can lead to significant improvements in efficiency, communication, and employee satisfaction.
Ready to bring your business to the next level?
Contact Towner Communications today to learn how our UCC solutions can help your Mid-Missouri business thrive.
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Surviving Team Collaboration Tools Overload!
How To Survive Team Collaboration Tool Overload
Google “business collaboration tools” and you’ll get 58 million results. Suffice it to say, there’s a proliferation of collaboration tools out there, especially over-the-top (OTT) applications to help your business.
Some tools are for chatting, some for conferencing, some for screen sharing, some for file sharing, and so on (to the tune of 58 million results).
Most organizations use a large number of tools for communicating, collaborating, and sharing, so it’s easy to understand how workers can feel overwhelmed by the different collaboration tools used between departments and vendors.
The company might have an official collaboration tool. But your department uses the free version of another tool for convenience. Another department is running an inexpensive version of the latest, flashiest social/mobile group chat platform. Several people use screen share software from a new startup they just heard about while your vendors are using the old standbys, and somewhere, somebody is still trying to use AIM.
That means your users’ desktops and browsers are cluttered with collaboration tools. The minutes wasted just figuring out which tool to use and updating to the latest version at the beginning of meetings begin to add up to hours, days, weeks of lost productivity. And security is probably a distant pipe dream. But it doesn’t have to be this way. You can tame the overload.
Here are eight steps you can take to get your company’s collaboration tool situation under control, pare down the number of applications in use, and start standardizing across your business to increase productivity.
Step 1: Identify current tools
When you run out of space on your smart phone, what’s the first thing you do? You identify the applications that are on your phone and take a hard, honest look at what you do and don’t use.
When employees run out of the capacity to handle the deluge of collaboration applications in use at your company, the first thing that needs to be done is similar—take an inventory of the tools users have on their systems.
You’ll probably find multiple applications for chat, video-conferencing, file storage, file sharing, etc.
Make a consolidated list of all the related applications you find and make notes about the primary functions of each.
Once you have a complete inventory, you’ll have laid the groundwork for step two.
Step 2: Identify your business needs
Now, it’s time to understand what exactly everyone is trying to accomplish with the different collaboration tools they’re using.
Ask yourself, your employees, your vendors, etc. what exactly they use each tool to accomplish, and why they prefer the tool that they use.
Some common functions include chat, group chat, file sharing, video calls, video conferencing, screen sharing, simultaneous file editing, approvals, and task/workflow management.
During this exercise, you’ll be able to see not only what collaboration tools different groups prefer, but why they use each tool. You might be surprised to learn that workers value one chat tool when you thought they preferred another. Or you might discover that they place more value on file sharing than they do on video calling. It may turn out that employees engaged in shadow IT are using a different tool simply because it offers a better user experience. Maybe the most important feature isn’t an application or communications channel in itself, but rather a capability—like a persistent experience across mobile as well as desktop.
The more data you gather, the clearer your company needs will be.
You may be able to gather a lot of this data by scanning employee devices, but some sort of direct employee engagement will be required. Employees are typically happy to fill out surveys to indicate their preferences, especially if the survey itself is intended to help make their lives easier.
If some employees are nervous about sharing, it may be important to assure them they won’t be disciplined (if you have company buy-in for this) for answering honestly. Some workers may be concerned that using things other than company purchased and/or approved collaboration tools will get them disciplined. But if you don’t create a safe enough environment to have an honest conversation about your company’s tools, you’ll never get a true view to help you get tool overload under control.
Step 3: Map needs to tools
Remember the application inventory you gathered? Now’s the time to bring it back.
Map the needs you’ve identified to the current tools you have. Which tools are offering the most collaboration capabilities based on the feedback you received? Which tools are under-utilized? Which tools are rarely utilized?
Take careful note of what you have, what you need, and be honest with your responses.
This step is for analysis only: don’t jump the gun and start cutting out applications. There are other consideration factors than the most popular applications for your employees (although that is absolutely important).
Step 4: Understand integrations
Here’s where your careful evaluation in step three will come in handy. Knowing the collaboration tools worth keeping depends on more than how certain tools map to certain needs: it’s also important to know how these applications interact with other applications, other collaboration tools, existing software—including, but not limited to—CRM, ERP, CMS, etc.
Is it necessary for your collaboration tools to be platform agnostic? Mobile-first? Easily scalable?
Different businesses have different needs, which is why so many collaboration tools exist in the first place. Different tools integrate with different vendors, software and APIs. Be picky—your employees will thank you for it.
Step 5: Consolidate tools
You’ve identified your current tools, specified your needs, mapped your needs to existing tools, and ran through your integration needs. Now’s the time to head to the chopping block.
See where you have overlap between tools. Look for opportunities to consolidate multiple functions into fewer tools if possible. Cut the applications that do not meet your needs or have insufficient integration capabilities.
It’s up to you if you wish to have multiple application tools to use if that works for you—otherwise cut the collaboration application dead weight.
But remember, it’s important to ensure that your final list of tools serves your workers’ needs.
If you cut critical capabilities when you cut out tools, you’ll find yourself right back where you started—with workers embracing shadow IT and unapproved tools to fulfill their needs.
If you’ve done your analysis thoroughly, your collaboration application list should shorten dramatically. If it hasn’t, it may be time to repeat steps one through five again to maximize the benefits of this exercise.
Step 6: Establish collaboration tool standards and policies
One of the reasons team collaboration tool overload exists in the first place is that companies haven’t established standards for preferred tools, that they fail to provide/approve tools that meet specific worker needs, or that they don’t enforce existing standards and policies. It’s never too late to lay down a concrete foundation for company-wide tools and applications.
If you don’t have standards and policies in place, this is the time to create them.
If you already have existing standards and policies in place, review them to make sure they’re up-to-date, especially with the company-wide collaboration applications now in place. Communicate your standards and policies far and wide within your company ad nauseum—it’s crucial to get your message across the multitude of messages your employees deal with every day.
Lastly, empower your IT staff to enforce these policies, whether it’s blocking certain applications from downloading, or performing daily/weekly/monthly scans for unapproved applications. If you find violators, be sure to understand why. They may help you uncover an important gap in your standards.
]Step 7: Provide adequate training
After you have the tools you need, and standards in place, make sure you provide training sessions so your employees know how to use your chosen tools and feel comfortable with them.
You can have the best collaboration tool out there, complete with chat, conferencing, calling, storage, and sharing features, with mobile-first design.
If your employees can’t figure out how to use it or access it from their devices, adoption and usage will suffer.
Then they’ll download the collaboration tools they are comfortable using, which will result in multiple applications across your company, and before you know it—you’re back to collaboration tool overload. Train your employees, provide support templates, enable your IT staff to answer any questions, or provide vendor contact information for product support.
When collaboration tools that meet your company’s needs are used effectively, productivity soars.
Step 8: Monitor and adjust
Keep an eye on usage to gauge what’s working and what’s not. When you catch something that isn’t working, make adjustments to tools, policies, standards, or workflows as necessary to get your employee collaboration back on track. There’s no reason to stick stubbornly to a standard or policy if it’s simply not working.
Kiss overload goodbye
Collaboration tool overload is more common than you think, but you can tame with this simple eight-step process. Making sure you understand the “why” that created the overload environment is key to getting it under control. And when you do, workers will benefit, your company communications will benefit, and overall company productivity and efficiency should benefit as well.
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What Pokémon Go Teaches Us about Collaboration Tool Strengths and Weaknesses
Pokémon GO is a hot topic. It seems you can’t escape it—in the news, on social media, or in your day-to-day life as you see people of all ages hunched over their phones, walking around outside. This wildly popular application has spurred discussions across a variety of topics—health, social interaction, marketing, gamification, pedestrian safety, and more.
There’s another lesson to learn from Pokémon GO: the value of a single, comprehensive application to enable team and project collaboration.
Observing strangers collaborate through this application can open your eyes to the potential potency (and potential shortcomings) of a business application that can foster teamwork in your business.
Setting the stage: the prologue
For those who aren’t sure how Pokémon GO works, it’s a real-time application in which you can catch Pokémon while walking around. With geo-tracking and real-time updates, players all experience the same interface—provided they’re in similar areas. The same creatures pop up on the screen, at the same time, at the same location. This accounts for many observations of increased social interaction, and also accounts for the parallel in team and project collaboration.
It begins with a quest
Parks are one of the best places to catch Pokémon. My husband and I frequent the park closest to us as a place to walk around and play Pokémon GO. We recently encountered a player who was on a quest for a specific Pokémon. He wasted no time in telling us he drove over 45 minutes to reach this park because he heard it was rich with a Pokémon he desperately wanted to add to his collection and asked us if we’d seen any.
We pointed him to an area where we found the creature he sought and we heard his triumph when he found it and added it to his collection. He proceeded to scour the park. Anytime we found the Pokémon he was looking for, we called out to him to help direct him to the right area to catch it. Strangers collaborating to chase invisible pocket monsters on a smartphone application—who’d have thought?
Teamwork makes the dream work
For this particular Pokémon GO player, he was able to complete his quest for catching Pokémon because all players experience the application in real time. By collaborating with other players, he identified the park as a place he needed to visit and he was able to add the necessary Pokémon to his collection. This story is a testament to the power of a real-time application and online collaboration capabilities accessible by all. If a player can accomplish so much from the application, what implications are there for businesses?
But could teamwork be easier?
The Pokémon GO collaboration experience could be better because it doesn’t offer the in-app ability to message another player or group, or share images of any kind. Although the application revealed the necessary Pokémon for this player, he relied on friends and external websites to provide the best possibility of completing his collection.
Maybe it’s because I’m a millennial but I honestly think the Pokemon Go collaboration experience could be both easier and improved: taking a seamless application operating in real-time and adding the ability to message others, post discussion threads, share images and insights, and work in other applications and links would enable any player to get the information needed to play effectively.
Relying on multiple applications to allow full collaboration creates a disjointed, less effective experience than if all of the capabilities were built-in.
Business collaboration in real time
It’s estimated that the average employee spends up to an hour every day trying to get in contact with people, find meeting rooms, and track projects and emails.
Helping employees easily contact each other can immediately boost productivity.
For a workforce on-the-go, uniting multiple channels of communications in a single mobile-first application—email, chat, phone calls, text, video—can drastically improve both productivity and output for a business. Top team collaboration tools make it a point to prioritize accessibility, visibility, and real-time tracking of various projects, documents, and presentations so workers get more out of every hour they put in.
If it works for Pokémon GO players, it will work for your business
Back to the zealous Pokémon GO player who traveled 45 minutes to get to the park that held the Pokémon he needed.
On the positive side, the synchronized application experience paired with real-time capabilities helped him to complete his. On the negative side, he had to lean on other applications to accomplish his mission, and was ultimately successful.
A comprehensive interface certainly would have helped him accomplish his goal more efficiently, just as a more complete collaboration tool helps workers get more done faster.
Unlike Pokémon Go, there are applications with a complete set of tools to help your employees collaborate. If you give your employees the opportunity to collaborate with a communications system that promotes project collaboration on a platform designed with mobile in mind, your employees will be able to work efficiently and effectively, at any time, in any location.
Many businesses today have one piece of the puzzle—like Pokémon GO—but choosing a truly integrated collaboration experience can really give you a competitive edge.
Team and project collaboration checklist
There are many communications vendors for businesses to choose from. In order to get the most effective solution for your business, make sure it is:
- Mobile-enabled
- Real-time
- Inclusive of all communications channels
- Ready for project collaboration
- Able to share documents and track updates
- Secure
- CRM-compatible
Our MiCloud Office platform has all these features and more. To get an idea of what a first-class, comprehensive system looks like, watch the MiCloud Office Demo.
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K-12 Education’s Best Path to the Cloud
Whether for cost-savings, BYOD considerations, ease of administration, or reliability, school districts across the United States are actively shifting communication and collaboration to the cloud. It’s a Path to the Cloud!
As part of this shift, schools and administrative offices are deploying Google’s cloud-based education apps – like Google’s free email services – allowing them to free up millions of dollars for other initiatives.
Some K-12 organizations have hesitations about the security of sensitive data in the cloud, but as adoption grows across the education sector, more and more schools are considering cloud technology to achieve their goals. Many educational organizations seeking the benefits of cloud communications and collaboration look to Mitel. We manage a rich ecosystem of solutions that’s integrated with the largest technology partners in the industry, including Google and Microsoft.
Many educational organizations seeking the benefits of cloud communications and collaboration look to Mitel. We manage a rich ecosystem of solutions that’s integrated with the largest technology partners in the industry, including Google and Microsoft.
Microsoft Lync Integration
Mitel MiVoice for Lync, for example, seamlessly integrates features – like integrated softphone, voice integration and click-to-call support – with Microsoft applications to offer robust voice capabilities.
Google Integration
Mitel MiCollab is our anywhere, any-device collaboration software. It integrates with Google Cloud Platform and Google Apps, enabling collaboration through voice; instant messaging; presence; and audio, video, and web conferencing. MiCollab also seamlessly interacts with Google’s calendar, email and contact management apps.
Bonus: With MiCollab, a user’s presence status automatically updates according to the Google Calendar scheduling.
“Given the explosive growth of cloud-based apps and communications, Mitel provides the best path to the cloud for schools.”
Cloud Deployment Flexibility
With a unified communications and collaboration architecture focused on ease of use and administration, Mitel provides public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid deployment models. With Mitel, your school can deploy applications in a private cloud, a public cloud, on premise, or a combination thereof. And you’re never locked in to a single deployment model—you can move applications when conditions change.
The software remains the same; only the location changes. It’s how our MiCloud for Education solutions easily accommodate school districts’ changing needs and preferences over time.
Cloud Security & Reliability
Cloud deployments merit special consideration when it comes to security. Your educational organization will need to work with communications and collaboration providers like Mitel to isolate and protect your networks, applications and data. But the technologies and strategies for securing cloud-based deployments are advancing every day, and Mitel is leading the charge.
If you’re concerned about the reliability of cloud communications, consider this: If your network fails, communication with the outside world will be impacted whether your system is on premise or in the cloud. Fortunately, in a highly distributed school system, a network failure in any building will only impact a single location, and mobile communications can help your school weather the event until full service is restored.
Finding Your Path to the Cloud
Hundreds of school districts throughout the United States have deployed Mitel Voice and Unified Communication solutions. They’ve found that the cloud is a far more dependable platform than they expected, and that it offers advantages they had never imagined. It’s time to start taking a serious look at long-term strategies for cloud communications at your school—and how MiCloud for Education can help.
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How the Right Customer Engagement Strategy Can Completely Transform Your Business
The term “contact center” often conjures up an image of large numbers of agents handling incoming and outgoing calls all day, every day. In some cases, this is an accurate interpretation of how customer engagement truly works.
However, Gartner predicts that by 2020, customers will manage 85 percent of their relationship with an enterprise without interacting with a human
With this in mind, it’s clear that contact center technology is going to increasingly drive digital engagements and organizational workflows. The focus is on removing departmental silos to ensure the full context can be brought to every single customer engagement and interaction.
A busy port tackles complex logistics
By way of example, a European sea port had a challenge connecting their large database of lorry drivers to incoming ships full of containers that needed ongoing transportation around the continent. The drivers were typically paid a day-rate, so the company needed a system to ensure that they efficiently allocated jobs, and then accurately and quickly paid for the work they’d completed. This may sound simple, but with one of the world’s busiest sea ports and a very large number of contract drivers, this was proving a complex scenario to manage well, and was potentially open to error and fraud.
The port ultimately worked with us to design a system that integrated our contact center with the company’s ERP (enterprise resource planning) system. As a new ship arrives in the port, the ERP system calculates the number of trucks, forklifts and cranes required and the contact center then automatically contacts the drivers by SMS. The driver responds by SMS, directly back into the contact center, indicating acceptance of the job in the ERP system. The driver then receives the destination by SMS and makes the delivery. Goods-in confirms the delivery by SMS, and the driver is automatically flagged for payment.
Keeping trucks rolling at a manufacturer
Similarly, a large truck manufacturer wanted to ensure fast, efficient, consistent and cost-effective repair and recovery when one of its vehicles suffered a breakdown. With their new system, in the event of a breakdown, the driver makes a quick call or SMS into a centralized contact center. The agent uses a desktop manager application to locate the nearest approved repair and recovery service, with an SMS triggering a callout to the truck location. The truck is repaired, confirmed by SMS and the contact center generates a ticket (with the call recording and SMS attached as an audit trail). Payment is then automatically processed via ERP integration.
Automating new advantages in place of human error
In both cases, the company used customer engagement technology and its close integration with the ERP system to facilitate a series of automated workflow processes to minimize human involvement and associated error. The organizations both ended up with an effective solution that both improved efficiency and removed costs. Learn how we can help and talk with us today.
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How to Record Phone Calls on a Mitel IP Phone
Mitel’s Record-a-Call feature offers you an easy way to archive calls. You can use this for training purposes, for your own reference, or to keep a record of advice that has been given to a client.
Before recording calls, check your legal position. You may need to notify your callers that they are being recorded.
This Mitel phone guide is for MiVoice Business (also known as Mitel 3300 ICP) users only.
Starting to Record On the Fly
You can start recording at any time by pressing the Record Call key on your Mitel IP phone. If you don’t have a feature key assigned to Record Call, you can ask us at Towner Communications if this option is available with your current system.
Many businesses find it more straightforward to record every call. If your phone system is set up in this way, you don’t need to manually start recording.
Pausing, Stopping and Resuming Recording
While your call is being recorded, you can use the soft keys on your phone to Pause, Stop or Resume the recording operation.
Pressing the Erase soft key, or the Cancel key, will stop the recording without saving it.
Note: if you put a call on hold, the recording will automatically stop. If you bring the call back from hold, a new recording will start.
Playing Back Call Recordings
You can listen to call recordings from your Mitel IP phone. All of your recordings are saved in your voicemail mailbox, so simply dial your mailbox like normal and follow the prompts.
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Are You Happy with Your Cloud Communications Provider?
Do you have a cloud communications provider? If you do, are you happy with them? It’s a question many business owners don’t ask themselves enough. Cloud communications is an investment of capital, time, and human resources—an investment that you should be thrilled with. Once we sign contracts, we tend to accept the level of service we receive without analyzing our satisfaction with what we actually get. Part of this resignation stems from the contracts signed up front: breaking contracts usually means serious financial detriment. In the business world, that’s highly frowned upon because you’re costing the company even more money. But if you weren’t bound by a contract, what would that mean to you?
When the honeymoon period is over
Business relationships are susceptible to the same characteristics of any personal relationship—sometimes entering into a contract with a vendor starts off flawlessly and everything is sunshine and rainbows. But far too often in business, once the dotted line is signed, things change: service levels drops off, promised features become elusive, and costs can skyrocket. Being stuck with a cloud communications provider who doesn’t put your business needs first is more than irritating—it can harm your customer service, internal productivity, and your bottom line.
When you want more features
Not every cloud communications provider is created equal. Once you choose your provider, you may initially be happy. You get the service level you expect, the features you wanted—all at a price you are comfortable paying. Technology is notorious for constantly evolving. And your provider may not offer the latest features you’re interested in for your business. While you may be happy with every other aspect of the business relationship, the bottom line is this: limited cloud features and offerings could jeopardize your business.
When the contract dictates your decision
I’d wager most businesses stay with their cloud communications provider because the contract is king. Why evaluate the level of service and feature offerings if both are satisfactory and you can’t go anywhere anyway? Evaluation is crucial to consider because the best-performing and most lucrative companies don’t just think about today, but think about their company’s future. Still, many companies are wary of breaking contracts. But what if the contract was removed from the equation? Right now, our cloud contract buyout program could remove the barrier for you and give your business the best cloud communications applications for today andtomorrow.
Questions to ask yourself
Now that we can remove your existing contract from the equation, there are some questions you should ask yourself to truly gauge your satisfaction with your current provider.
1. Am I happy with the level of service I receive from my current cloud provider?
2. Do I have the features I need to maximize my business productivity?
3. Is my cloud provider a leader in Gartner’s five magic quadrants?
4. Do I trust my cloud provider to offer the latest and greatest features?
5. Is my cloud communications platform easy to use?
6. Does my cloud communications platform enable team and project collaboration?
If you answered “yes” to all the above, congratulations! You have a cloud communications provider that works for you and your business needs.
If you answered “no” to one question, you might have the right cloud provider for you—but why not verify by checking just in case?
If you answered no to two or more questions, you should strongly consider looking into Mitel’s cloud contract buyout program. As a leader in Gartner’s five magic quadrants, Mitel is uniquely positioned to provide the cloud communications your business or enterprise needs.
Nearly 2,000 cloud subscribers choose Mitel each day. Businesses across the world trust Mitel for their cloud communications solutions—see how Towner Communications can help.
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