Why should your company unifiy its communications?

In my last post I asked the question "Why should your company unify its communications?" It's a valid question, especially given the current economic challenges globally. It is precisely this reason, however, that your company should look at ways to unify its communications platform.  I'm going to give you two high level examples of how coalescing your communications can help your organization through these challenging times. 
First, it simplifies the management of your infrastructure. With a unified communications solution, regardless of the vendor you go with on it, your organizations needs for a "telephony" staff and a "network" staff should go away. Unifying allows your organization to merge these too groups, providing more flexibility for scheduling and staffing. This also allows for your organization to simplify its training needs. No longer do you have to send (and spend) on both telephony and network training. It's effectively all-in-one by most vendors now.
Second, it breaks down communications barriers. The average SMB worker spends 3.3 hours a week working through communications barriers according to a recent report from Siemens. It is one of several things that hinders productivity, customer satisfaction and employee satisfaction but is one that is addressable by UC solutions. A communication barrier, according to this report, was anything that was caused by inaccessibility or lack of full collaboration with fellow employees.
Let's do some simple math around this number shall we? Let's say you have 150 workers with an average salary of $60,000 per year. That salary breaks down to $1200 per week on a 50 week work year (everyone needs a vacation!). If you break this down further, that means that each employee costs $30 per hour to the organization based on a 40 hour work week. Multiply 30 by 3.3 and you end up with a cost of $99 per week per employee trying to fight through communication barriers. Extrapolate this out further: Let's say you have 100 employees out of your 150 who are struggling through these communication barriers. That means you organization is losing $9,900 per week in lost productivity. Over a year that adds up to a whopping $495,000 (50 week work year). Of course there are variances that your particular organization would have to take into consideration when you start determining just how much communication barriers are costing your company. The point of this exercise is to point out the obvious: it adds up very quickly! Let's say you go all out and buy a $150,000 UC solution. Using this simple math you would see your ROI in 15 weeks.
These are just two of a variety of reasons why your organization should consider unifying its communication platforms. Ultimately it will save your organization money, increase employee productivity and satisfaction as well as customer satisfaction.
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This page contains a single entry by Clinton Fitch published on March 12, 2009 5:50 PM.

So What Exactly is Unified Communications? was the previous entry in this blog.

So what exactly is this Presence thing? is the next entry in this blog.

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