This is a guest blog post by Mick Miralis, Executive Vice President, Star2Star.

Your enterprise has been through a lot over the last year, trying to maintain business continuity during a global pandemic. This has likely involved going through accelerated cloud adoption on multiple fronts, increased digital transformation, changes in customer buying behavior, and a global shift to remote work, to name just a few examples.

Related: Why Your Business Needs Voice, Video & Collaboration Tools

With so many changes taking place at once, it can be difficult to ensure strong employee engagement and productivity — two critical needs for organizations heading into 2021.

In this blog post, we’ll point out how your company can improve employee engagement and productivity by integrating Star2Star’s Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) platform with your Citrix environment.

Why Integrate Star2Star’s UCaaS Solution with Citrix?

If you’re unfamiliar with how UCaaS works, the process involves centralizing multiple communications tools into a flexible cloud repository. This allows for contextual communications that facilitate seamless experiences for employees and customers; wherever they are, they have the communications and collaboration tools they need to stay in touch.

Related: Are You With The Right VoIP Provider?

When you integrate Star2Star’s UCaaS solutions with your Citrix environment, you can increase productivity, reliability, and security for employees and customers to communicate and collaborate — while reducing complexity and lowering your monthly communications expenses in the process.

Star2Star’s UCaaS provides the following services:

  • Flexible Business Voice
  • Instant messaging and chat
  • Virtual meetings and screen sharing
  • Instant and secure file collaboration
  • Tasks, notes, and productivity software
  • Built-in workflow tools
  • Third-party software integration (Such as Office365 Contact, Calendar, OneDrive and Google Contacts, Calendar, and G-Drive)
  • App Catalog integrations (Salesforce, Github, JIRA, Zendesk, and more)

The Top Three Benefits of UCaaS

UCaaS makes it a lot easier for your global workers by giving them the freedom and flexibility to communicate and collaborate from any global location. It’s no surprise that 74 percent of new UC licenses will be cloud-based by 2024, up from 48 percent in 2019.

But not all UCaaS solutions are created equal, which is why it’s important to consider which solutions offer you the highest quality solutions and services for the best value. Star2Star’s UCaaS is highly complementary with Citrix products and services, further enabling secure and efficient work from anywhere experiences. Star2Star’s UCaaS element builds from Citrix’s innovative foundation.

Here are some of the top benefits of using Star2Star UCaaS within the Citrix environment:

Increase Productivity

There’s an app for everything these days, and many employees are suffering from “app overload.” UCaaS helps by bringing multiple communications tools into one place for contextual experiences, including email, messaging, SMS, and voicemail, while also enabling employees, customers, vendors, and partners to integrate their workflows.

In addition, UCaaS:

  • Removes the distance barrier for mobile and remote workers
  • Offers synergy between communication applications and business software for a seamless end-user experience (e.g., integrates with SFDC or SugarCRM to add phone and video)
  • Breaks down silos across businesses
  • Automates workflows between business applications and voice/video (e.g. transcribing discussions into a CRM)
  • Empowers cross-functional team collaboration via workflow automation
  • Reduces the need to wait for feedback via email/voicemail
  • Increases operational efficiency

Support Digital Transformation

UCaaS can also help modernize your enterprise and drive digital transformation, enabling your company to migrate away from hardware-based communications systems.

Here are some ways that UCaaS can drive digital transformation:

  • Futureproof the business through SaaS and cloud delivery
  • Integrate scalability, flexibility, and versatility in the communications stack
  • Support mobile and remote workers
  • Meet rising customer demands
  • Break down data and communications silos across the organization
  • Make it easier for IT to support end-users with multiple devices
  • Build synergy across businesses and simplify IT initiatives via API integration
  • Set the stage for big data analytics, artificial intelligence, and the IoT

Improve Top-Line Review

UCaaS can also reduce backend communications costs, improving top-line revenue for the organization.

UCaaS can boost revenue in the following ways:

  • Consolidate and integrate multiple products into one interface
  • Reduce travel costs, fuel consumption, and property costs
  • Reduce hardware and CapEx through the cloud
  • Reduce network provider costs through consolidation to one vendor
  • Enable BYOD, as mobile apps can replace hardware phones
  • Improve customer service
  • Reduce IT effort through the simple deployment

Announcing Star2Star and Citrix Integration

Citrix customers now have access to a powerful and flexible UCaaS solution which are validated as Citrix Ready, thanks to an exciting partnership with Star2Star.

Star2Star provides an end-to-end, cloud-native communication and collaboration platform that seamlessly integrates voice, video, mobile, chat, fax, presence information, texting, and more.

Customers can now access Star2Star’s communications and collaboration solutions that are optimized with virtual apps and desktops, and leverage more from their Citrix Workspace. The result is the most secure and robust end-to-end digital user experience on the market.

To learn more, contact the team today.