Unified Communications is much more than a set of communication tools

A lot has been said over the years about the technology that enables Unified Communication (UC) – much less about its ROI and business impact. In the second of his series of articles establishing the real business impact and ROI of UC, Manish Sablok, Head of Marketing for CNE Europe at Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise, explains how UC enables enterprises to optimise their communications in three key ways – optimising employee productivity, reducing sales cycles and reducing the cost of lost opportunities.

*This is the second in a series of articles covering the benefits of UC, the first of which looked at how the adoption of UC is being driven by the four key people pain-points: waiting for information, dealing with complaints, off-site productivity loss, and challenges to collaboration.

For a long time, UC has been defined by a particular set of tools and the argument for its adoption has been all around its technology, rather than on the fundamental concepts underlying its importance in improving business processes and outcomes. More recently we have seen a new term, 'Optimised Communications' starting to be used to define the use of these sorts of tools to better define the enterprise benefits of UC as a solution for 'optimising organisational goal attainment while enhancing the user experience'.

This focus on optimising business results brings a new angle to the UC argument, and I believe that there are three key areas where the results of UC can be truly shown to optimise business processes and start to bring measurable ROI across the enterprise.

First: Optimise productivity
Recent research indicates that 75% of the time wasted by the average employee can be saved with unified communications solutions.
How do these statistics stack up with your own experience of time spent in multiple attempts to contact co-workers and colleagues, finding key information, duplicating the same communications or simply dealing with unwanted communications that can often waste employees' time?
The research found that 67 minutes a day is spent trying to find key information and digging for what they need, 39 minutes a day is spent on duplicating the same communications, 33 minutes wasted on attempting to schedule meetings without success and 29 minutes a day is unwanted communications wasting the employee’s time. A UC solution can offer a proven method for optimising employee productivity.

With a UC strategy in place providing a personalised communications environment for employees, the research estimated that 75% of the time wasted by the average employee can be saved. In other words, UC technology is optimising employee communications with benefits to business processes – and of course to employee satisfaction.

Second: Reduce your sales cycle – by up to 40% in some cases
In more concrete ‘bottom line’ terms, a company's sales cycle can be dramatically shortened by using UC tools – particularly in the initial stages of establishing relationships with prospects and then again, in the later stages of order fulfilment and delivery.

For example, let’s take a typical sales cycle of ten weeks, incorporating the initial relationship building process to gain brand recognition with a customer, followed by the formulation of the solution, close and sale and finally, the delivery and evaluation of the implementation.

In this example, just by implementing a 'one number service' and introducing Instant Messaging (IM) communication, the first and last stages of this sales cycle can begin to be reduced. An optimised and more personal communication process helps to establish better relationships and resolve queries in the delivery process much faster. We have seen cases in one such scenario where UC eliminated 50% of the short delays due to unsuccessful customer attempts to reach the sales team, thereby reducing the cycle to 9 weeks in length.

And by going even further and applying UC collaboration tools, our experience shows that proposal reviews, clarifications required and any re-designs or re-quotes can be processed much faster, in one case shortening the sales cycle from 10 to just 6.5 weeks.

So, depending on the business, by improving customer relationships and accessibility to the sales team, projects can be completed much more quickly, freeing up the sales team to move on to other business projects.

There are of course other aspects to a sales cycle that should not be overlooked. You may require co-operation between different suppliers which can impact greatly not only existing relationships, but can also cause delays. Here, a UC solution can help integrate these co-operations into a single optimised sales process, making communication easier for all parties.

Third: Reduce opportunities lost
Reducing the sales cycle is one key advantage of UC, but reducing lost opportunities in terms of sales is another area that it can address. Again our experience has shown that the use of UC tools can seriously help in reducing lost opportunities.

In the same sales context, employees can often get preoccupied with completing internal administration processes which detract from their day-to-day job, or can lose connectivity when they're away from the office, meaning that they lose communication with colleagues and clients.

The enablement of multi-media communication on employees' smart devices can be key, introducing powerful and easy to use tablets to the sales team – in other words empowering employees and providing them with the best communication tools possible – and meaning that potential opportunities can be maximised.

In another example, if a customer service agent doesn't have the correct customer information to hand, or does not connect them to the right person at the right time, customer satisfaction can be significantly reduced, and the opportunity to up-sell and cross-sell is lost.

By enabling employees to use UC tools effectively across the enterprise, it's possible to minimise such losses.

Optimise your communication
Too often, UC capabilities have been defined by IT vendors in a way that serves their own point of view – selling technology tools. Yes, we at Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise have our own product set to support UC in terms of our OpenTouch™ Suite, which enables native multi-party and multimedia collaborative conversations on any device, whether smartphone, tablet, deskphone or PC. But OpenTouch does more than this. It makes mobility a natural extension of the communication, collaboration, sharing, multi-tasking and multimedia experience, and enables colleagues to communicate in order to achieve those goals through business process enablement.

So while UC is about integrating communication technologies, it should also focus on helping enterprises achieve their business goals, providing employees with the flexibility and choice in terms of communication tools, the correct information and context to help optimise interactions.
In this way, companies can witness the benefits of reducing the sales cycle, wasted time, and lost opportunities in order to achieve core business goals.

UC is truly much more than a set of communications tools. It enables businesses to use technology in order to optimise their business processes and achieve their goals. Only then will their communications be truly optimised.