Communications solutions are incredibly valuable to your business. A Unified Communications (UC) solution supports greater collaboration and better customer service; it also improves efficiency and increases productivity. But not every UC solution is the best one for your business. How do you sort through them to find out which ones might be?

Unified Communication Services: Discover What's Right For You

Whatever is at the heart of what you need in a UC service, find it with these four steps:

1. Do Your Research

Start with research before you meet with vendors, cautions Jim Tynan, Twinstate's VP of Sales. The moment you meet with a vendor, that vendor will tell you that they're the best.

"But the world is different now. We don't have to rely on manufacturers to educate us," says Tynan. "Use YouTube, Gartner, and free demo options to understand exactly which service provides which benefit to your business, and the manner in which the vendor provides that service." Point being, education at your own pace is a much better option than an immediate call to a salesperson who might move at a different one. It allows you to move to step 2 without interference.

2. Set Your Requirements

"Get yourself to a point where you're comfortable knowing what you want to see before you choose to bring that service in," says Tynan. "See each service independently so you can determine what you think is best."

Start by considering all of your research and mapping the benefit of each service to your needs. Do you need to be able to share documents? Integrate with your CRM? Or just see a visual representation of who is available to take a call at a given time?

Respond to your needs as you set your requirements. Ask yourself: How many devices does your provider need to support? Do you only need UC when you're on the office Internet?

Or do you need to be able to deploy the solution anywhere, anytime and in any way you'd like to deploy it? If so, you might list "flexibility" and "freedom" as part of your requirements. Detail what each of those terms mean to you so that when you move to step 3, you'll be ready.

3. Assess Vendors

Once you've developed a clear list of your requirements, you can begin to assess vendors. You may have already considered some vendors as you moved through your research, including those free demos. But now is the time to reach out and meet with your options.

Despite the fact that your requirements will be central to the conversation, you should also be considering the credentials and personalities of the vendors themselves. Certain traits might even make it onto your list of requirements.

"As much as the application itself is important, your end user experience is dependent on the people you work with," says Tynan. "It's about knowing what you want to see in a platform, and then asking, 'Who is a good partner to implement this for me? Who has the expertise?'"

One more thing to keep in mind: You don’t want to deal with a provider that has to rely on another provider or manufacturer to get the job done. Again, the flexibility requirement stands out as one of the more important traits in a UC service and provider.

4. Choose a Partner

This step is easier said than done. But making the call is what you need to do to move forward. You don't want to get stuck in the common business trap of performing research, nailing down your requirements, speaking to vendors and then waiting so long to implement a solution that your requirements (or the vendor's specialties) have changed by the time you get around to it. Choose a partner, and begin the work of collaborating to create the best possible outcome for your business as you move to UC.