8 steps to becoming a UC expert

Before you can even start to talk about unified communications, you’d better be able to tell your clients what specifically it is.

What is unified communications?

What is unified communications? "Some people think it’s just VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) [voice-over-IP telephony] nevertheless it’s not," says Leon Friend, product technical specialist at Avnet. A better definition might include all the things that unified communications does.

Vendors describe the goal of unified communications as providing a single experience, in the office or on the road. That single experience can raise productivity, lower costs and improve efficiency in a business. It’s a great story for your clients – however a hard one to sell and turn into reality. The upside is less competition and higher margins, which is a worthy goal for any reseller business.

Highly technical area

While unified communications can be a highly technical area and an integration minefield, familiarity with the hardware and software is only half the game. The real battle is learning to deal with the breathing, fleshy part of the solution – the end user. Engineers and administrators deploying servers, firewalls and switches have most of their conversations with the IT manager.

Unified communications, on the oher side of the coin, is a business process and requires dealing with the end user who, unfortunately, may not always know the answer to critical questions.

The scenarios in which they use the phone

Users at times need help outlining all the scenarios in which they use the phone and how this works in the business. Building a user profile for each employee requires strong consulting skills, which aren’t easy to find.

"We are having to hire more people who realise this is not a box to install," Tom Morgan, CEO of unified communications reseller eVideo Communications, says. He sees his competitors struggling with "legacy staff" in technical or sales who don’t understand the difficulties in selling and installing UC.

The outlay on staff or training

If your business can’t afford the outlay on staff or training, at the time perhaps look at leaving the integration work to a full-service vendor, just as the cloud-based M5 Networks.

The key business stakeholders are very different, too. The power communications user in nearly every organisation is the receptionist – whose opinion on a solution’s usability might carry more weight than the IT manager’s.

The receptionist

"You have to talk to the receptionist and cover off all their concerns," Avnet’s Friend says. "A lot of key business stakeholders will consider that as long as the receptionist is happy we know we can receive all our phone messages."