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Unified Communications
Featured Article
UC Mag
Paula Bernier
Executive Editor,

IP Communications Magazines

The Skinny on UC ROI: Desperate Times Call for Targeted Solutions

Unified communications means different things to different people, but for many it implies the use of tools to help employees more efficiently manage their communications. However, as many folks in the industry are now saying, it's tough to make the UC sale by talking in broad brush strokes about productivity gains. Instead, customers are looking for targeted solutions that offer clear returns on investment.




 

Don Brown, co-founder, chairman and CEO of Interactive Intelligence, a global provider of unified IP business communications solutions, said in his keynote last month at ITEXPO West that unified communications is a grand concept cooked up by marketers and based on the shock-and-awe theory that if you bowl over prospects by touting feature after feature they will finally say "no mas" and buy it. In fact, he says, that's not the case. Rather, UC needs to be about helping businesses realize tangible cost savings.

 

Matthew Krueger, vice president of marketing and business development for Network Equipment Technologies, says a lot of enterprises are now end-of-lifeing the telephony equipment they installed in the year 2000. At the same time, he adds, IT budgets are being slashed. As a result, there are not a lot of completely new systems being installed; instead, investments in application-specific solutions such as voicemail consolidation have the greatest appeal.

 

Moving voicemail to Microsoft Exchange is one common example of how businesses are employing UC to lower their costs and realize a hard ROI, he says. If a business already has a Microsoft enterprise license, voice is already included, he says, so all the business needs is an extra server.

 

Another UC-related application with a hard ROI is conferencing, Krueger adds. While there's a lot of talk about cloud computing and software as a service, Krueger says businesses that outsource their conferencing are charged by the minute, but if they bring that in house onto their own servers it can be much more cost efficient. Conferencing can result in charges of up to $5,000 a call, he says, but in house the cost is virtually zero. In fact, NET did just that within its own company recently, he says.

 

But Brown of Interactive Intelligence said UC can be used to go beyond just application-specific solutions to create entirely new and much more efficient ways of doing business.

 

"At Interactive Intelligence we want to use communications technology to build an all-in-one process automation platform," he said.

 

That entails creating process and bringing communications into the mix so work is done more efficiently. The value in communications is in getting more work done with fewer people, he said. "To me this has to be the goal of any revolution in technology."

 

Brown said that will require businesses to figure out what data is needed. Then the businesses need to populate end user forms. Then they must lay out a process flow that explains the stages through which work goes and the actions involved in each of those stages. One of those actions could be the ability to invoke web services (both internal and external), to obtain a customer's credit score from Experian, for example, said Brown.

 

Once the framework for how work is done is in place, employees can be presented with work via their computers, he said. They can see on the form what they need to do at each step along the way, just like call reps do in the contact center. And that process can be launched in various ways using different technologies, but there's a standard process for actually doing it, he said.Not only does that allow employees to keep track of work, it also allows supervisors to see what's going on.

 

"A supervisor can see work and whose desk it's sitting on - whose desk is holding up that lead from that important customer," said Brown.

 

Process automation can also be helpful in the execution of governmentaudits, he added.

 

In the future, Brown envisions something like the Apple AppStore where you could buy access to a web service that provides some critical link to a government healthcare information system or some other function provided by third parties, and communications systemsthat don't think in terms of phone calls and texts, but also look at process automation, e-learning and business analytics.

 

"At that point the phone system takes over the business," he said.

 

All of this involves communications technology applied in a way that relates to real-life business challenges and the bottom line. Brown said that's a much better approach to selling communicationsthan is hyping as new what are often just renamed communicationscapabilities.

 







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