ROI from UC: Three Top Considerations

By David Portnowitz

Hybrid cloud communications, especially unified communications (UC), is in growth mode, and no wonder: The technology provides a suite of robust features that can help boost your organization’s bottom line in many different ways, including enabling disaster recovery plans, line pooling and bursting, mobility, boosting reliability and cost savings from eliminating CPE.

To expand on what we previously talked about when it comes to ROI, below are three more surefire ways you’ll generate positive returns from your cloud-based UC solution:

1. Better Customer Service

For most businesses, delivering exceptional customer service is a key differentiator and the linchpin of customer loyalty—which means more profit. Hybrid UC can be an anchor technology for this. For instance, in a retail environment where sales associates are out on the floor, moving around, assisting customers, a good UC system allows associates to quickly communicate with other departments about item availability and pricing while staying with the customer. Similarly, in a contact center scenario, UC allows companies to use presence information to forward help requests to on-call staff using the communications method they prefer—thus providing faster first-call resolution and making for happier customers.

2. Enabling Mobile as a Customer Service Channel

According to a survey conducted by market research firm Chadwick Martin Bailey, there has been an increase in customer service employee productivity and faster problem resolution for 67% of UC user organizations from such features as click-to-call, corporate directory access, presence, and visual voicemail on mobile devices.

3. Streamlined Message Management

In that same survey, half of the organizations that use UC have saved as much as 20 minutes per employee due to more efficient message management alone. The ability to start communicating via one channel (say, a desk phone) and seamlessly continue the conversation using a different device (one’s mobile, for instance) also translated into big productivity gains. About 49 percent of saved up to 20 minutes per employee daily by reaching workers on the first try; some 54 percent saved that time daily by escalating IM chats into phone calls; and 50 percent saved up to 20 minutes per employee daily by escalating IM chats into web conferences.