This week’s issue of Unified Communications eWeekly is sponsored by The VoiceCon Tour 06:

One-day workshops focusing on application pay-offs in enterprise IP Telephony—SIP, Unified Communications and Next-Gen Contact Centers. Plus, User Forums where enterprise executives share the lessons learned from their migration. Remaining dates and cities are: San Francisco, Nov. 6; Chicago, Nov. 15; New York City; Nov 28. Full agenda and registration details are at: http://www.voicecon.com/tour/

Q: How can you get optimal results from your communications investment budget?
A: Easy—Focus your spending on the investments with the highest returns!

But of course we all know that in the real world, it’s not easy to find the highest of all possible returns. Still there are targets of opportunity, and here are a couple of real-life examples.

Take a case of a mobile field sales person in a high-ticket industry, who is seldom at her office desk and is usually making calls from a personal contacts list or an enterprise sales management application. Also, when this salesperson needs help, the ability to see presence-based availability of support staff can help to speed up a sales transaction or improve customer service.

Enter Unified Communications (UC). Our salesperson now can make calls by clicking directory entries on her cell phone/Blackberry or by saying the customer’s name through a speech interface. Some new UC applications provide presence indications on the mobile device, so the salesperson can get immediate help, without having to call multiple team members. Companies who use this approach have reported measurable increases in annual sales productivity, usually about 10% per year.

The cost of this mobile feature is about the same as putting a new IP phone on the salesperson’s desk. So, if you were choosing which investment to make, the mobility features are likely to produce the highest returns.

Another investment option example involves SIP (Session Initiation Protocol), which has many possible applications for Unified Communications. You might find yourself facing two choices: Whether to install a SIP application server to connect your enterprise web portal to your IP PBX or to enable SIP interfaces to your desktops.

The first option enables your customers or business partners to use “click to connect” to find the best available person to serve them, or to link them directly to your call center without requiring them to dial a number. The second option would give you a wider array of choices for phones and potentially lower costs, and the ability to enable new features.

Since both options have positive ROI, you could do both. But, in most situations, the customer-facing application would generate the highest return and thus be the first choice for investment.

The real message here is to examine your investment options in the context of all that new technology has to offer. If you look at IP Telephony and converged networks as a simple replacement for your circuit-switched, TDM network—and you stay with the same thinking used for that network—you’re not going to be able to exploit what IP Telephony has to offer.

Similarly, UC offers the potential to transform communications and business processes in your company. If you look at your investment options in terms of how the overall business will be affected, you’re likely to find that UC-oriented solutions generate the highest returns.

By focusing on high-ROI applications you accomplish two important objectives: First, you help to better align IT with the overall business objectives; second, you help your organization’s users and management achieve the next plateau of growth, cost-containment and bottom-line results. And, an important side-benefit—your communications suppliers also will get the message and will shift the focus of their new product development. Using history as a guide, it was precisely this sort of ROI-driven thinking that drove progress in the contact center application arena.

What do you think? Send your comments, thoughts and questions about Unified Communications planning to mparker@vanguard.net or www.ucstrategies.com

Marty Parker
Principal Consultant
Communications Perspectives

Posted in Implementation, Contact Centers/CRM, Applications, Marty Parker, Unified Communications |

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