Scott Corry is business unit manager for Jabra at Kathea.

The 21st century could just as easily be dubbed the ‘Communication Age’, and today it is encouraging to see that even with all our technology advances over the centuries, voice still retains its rank as a dominant asset to promoting productive communication in the workplace. In fact, voice is integral to the human need to communicate – particularly for business – and therefore in this century, progressive uptake of unified communications (UC) is at the centre of this market about-turn.

Market adoption has shown that as the global Internet footprint becomes far more pervasive, so does the uptake of UC. In reality, according to Datamonitor, following the shift to voice over Internet Protocol, other advanced telephony features have emerged.

Additionally, as mobile phones increasingly become widely accepted as a primary tool in business communications the uptake of mobile UC applications is being driven by the ability to enhance productivity and customer services even further. The first step, however, to achieving full UC is voice integration.

To prove this to be the case, in 2010, Jabra undertook a first large-scale UC implementation throughout its head office and operations in Denmark. The programme demonstrated that when UC was used in tandem with UC-optimised headsets, it enabled staff to seamlessly switch between landline and mobile phones and/or softphone calls – and this seamless switching resulted in a 50% improvement in staff productivity within the first year.

While the ability to multitask during calls undoubtedly played a big role in achieving this heightened productivity, this project clearly demonstrated that making hands-free communications available to all is a key component to staff efficiency. Let’s face it, a 50% improvement in productivity is massive for any business, and in today’s turbulent economy, organisations really need to start harnessing the power and convergence of voice communications for increased business efficiencies.

Voice communications has come full circle and should be top of mind when planning investments for a business’s communication mix. Capital investments should therefore be spent on sourcing and implementing innovative solutions that will complement future market evolutions, and boast immediate returns on investment in employee efficiency and productivity – and ultimately the profitability of the business.