Reducing Operation Costs and Increasing Productivity Are Big Wins for UC Customers
Not surprisingly, many companies have cost saving expectations when considering a new business phone system.
In this informative webinar excerpt, Digium talks about recent Gartner and Aberdeen surveys of companies and how they’ve really improved productivity and saved big money with a unified telecommunications system.
Video Transcript
Gartner Study on Unified Communications
So starting out with customer expectations. Gartner recently did a survey of enterprise businesss and looking at this particular sample of data…They determined that the main thing that people are really looking for is reducing their operating costs.
So how can save montly on their telephony charges, how can they improve how their employees work and maybe use headcount more efficiently and not have so many people maintain and support the phone system.
That goes in turn with improved productivity. So again, just determining from their employee base, how they can actually work smarter.
And then they also want to improve reliability in communications. So they want to able to make their communications more reliable. Also give them the ability to communicate from their various devices. So they’re able communicate from where they want to. They’re not always tied to their office desk phone to receive their voice mail. To really get business done, they would like to have the solutions or options elsewhere.
They also want to improve cross functional communication and collaboration.
Aberdeen Study on Unified Communications
Aberdeen also did a study as well. And some of the things they found as well were…
When looking at implementing unified communications into their network, they were actually able to improve their customer service metrics by 53%.
They were able to improve their workforce productivityby 49%.
And increase their response time due to mobile integration. So just being able to service their customers faster. Being able to always access their email, being able to access their voice mail on their mobile devices, being able to return costs and get business done no matter where they are. They were actually to make this happen and improve response time by 85%.
So again, huge savings. And these are not always quantifiable. I like to refer to these as soft cost savings. They are not always easy to measure these types of improvements but Aberdeen was able to dive into this data a little more and determine how are they improving workforce productivity. Are they able reallocate headcount to other positions and get more work done? Are they able the response time and other to be able to determine those types of parameters.
One thing I’d like to note. One thing we’ve been looking and seeing is there really is an increase in IT spending. So 2012 is the year people are considering spending more money on IT. And that doesn’t mean overall budgets are increasing.
In fact the Wall Street Journal recently had a article saying that addressed this. And it said specifically that budgets are being cut, people were traveling less. Not only were they traveling less, they were cutting costs elsewhere. So they were not increasing headcount, they were not getting raises or bonuses. But the one area where they were willing to spend and where people are allocating money was IT. The reason, according to the Wall Street Journal, business are really looking for a competitive edge.
Features such as mobile integration with tablets, with cloud technologies with applications that you can access from their mobile devices. Companies are wanting to make this accessible to their employees. So they’re willing to spend the IT dollars to provide that secure type of implementation. But also to give themselves their business the competitive edge, make them look more professional, to improve that response time. And to adhere to many of the things that Gartner and Aberdeen looked at in their recent survey.
Anyway, to that end. Yes, IT spending is increasing and we’ll go through one way your phone system or you communications system can help to provide these features.