Putting employee needs in the driving seat: The growth of Unified Communications in enabling RoI

The Unified Communications (UC) market is predicted to grow from $26.2 billion this year to be worth almost $38 billion by 2016 (IDC), driven by a number of new trends – including social collaboration, BYOD and an increasingly mobile workforce. But what Return on Investment (RoI) can be expected with such a technology? It's a question often asked, and here, Manish Sablok, Head of Marketing, CNE Europe at Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise identifies four key pain points which are driving the adoption of UC with significant RoI in both cost and productivity.

This is the first of a series of articles covering the hard and soft benefits of UC, from re-defining employee communication to shortening a company’s business processes – including the sales cycle and the supply chain.

The changing workplace – a mobile workforce needing to work on the move, increased expectations of video communications and more team-based workflows amongst employees – is forcing enterprises to embrace new methods of communicating and collaborating. Employees on the road or working remotely are demanding the ability to seamlessly communicate with colleagues and customers effectively from whichever device they prefer, whether that's a PC, a tablet or smartphone, and on their media of preference, including visual.

UC has been much heralded as the solution – but what is it? Effective UC is defined as integrating real-time and non-real time communication with business processes. Key to this technology is the ability to present a consistent unified user interface and experience across multiple devices and media types. UC is not one single product – it forms a solution made up of a variety of components and elements including email, instant messaging, voice call, web conferencing, online presence, as well as web chat and document sharing. The key – and the real value of UC – is that all of this is tied together with an integrated user interface over multiple devices.

The budgets are there
With UC technology proven and ready to be delivered, the good news is that IT managers now have a budget for UC. One recent Ovum survey, entitled 'The Future of Unified Communications & Collaboration', asked IT managers and those responsible for a UC&C strategy whether they have plans to implement at least some UC&C in the next two years. A huge 80% responded positively to this question, but even more interestingly, 78% – almost the same percentage – also claimed that they had dedicated budget to do so.

Such a close coupling of these two statements shows that there is renewed interest in implementing UC, and the fact that financial backing is available shows that UC is being taken seriously within the enterprise as a viable option to improve RoI and as a result, provide real people-based communications.

The four people-driven Pain-Points
So what's driving this growth in the Unified Communications market? There are four distinct pain points which are driving current adoption levels of Unified Communications:
1. Waiting for Information – It's all about getting the right information to the right person at the right time without wasted effort in communication. Employee communication is often all about trying to contact colleagues, duplicating the same communications over and over again, as well as making unwanted communications. One of the key user pain points driving the shift towards UC is enabling employees to get in touch with an individual via multiple means of communication in order to make progress on a particular process or task.
2. Customer complaints due to lack of communication – Customer frustration and complaints are often due to a company’s own internal communications inadequacies – lack of communication between departments, inability to contact the correct person – and these all cause customer dissatisfaction, so that what started as a simple customer query ends up as a complaint. Very often, these stem from the communication policies and technology of the company. Implementing the right UC elements changes all that.
3. Off-site Productivity Loss – Yes, we all have an increasing mobile workforce, but employees often lose productivity and responsiveness when off-site, and their outputs can be significantly reduced when working from a location other than one of the company's offices. Aside from the length of time it can take to get a task completed in this instance, there are of course multiple additional costs of doing so.
4. Challenges to Collaboration – BYOD, the increase of Generation Y in the workplace, social media such as Facebook coming into the workplace, as well as increasingly mobile employees –can all result in complex delivery and multiple vendors. Often the result is little real collaboration due to inaccessibility to the tools required in order to collaborate fully with colleagues. UC provides the answer.

And delivery is here – not just for large organisations – SMBs can benefit
UC is not just a concept – it is now a deliverable and executable solution. By integrating UC with business processes and applications, communication and collaboration can be streamlined, human latency reduced or even eliminated, and workers can be more productive, efficient and responsive. In fact, they can work as they expect to work.

Communication both inside and outside of the enterprise is significantly enhanced, resulting in shorter project times, quicker time-to-market, improved worker productivity and organisational efficiency, which in turn can improve customer service, shorten sales cycle times and increase revenues as a result.

Our own OpenTouch™ Suite for example enables native multi-party and multimedia collaborative conversations on any device – smartphone, tablet, deskphone, PC – the options are endless. Want to add video? Easy. Want to check something with accounts while still on a call? Easy. Through the development of what is now a compelling user experience, it's possible to encourage rich and frequent employee conversations combined with the ability to add people to a conversation in real-time.

Start a call in the car, continue the same call seamlessly as you walk through the office, and then finish it off at your desk on your laptop. Easy. The ability to move the multimedia conversation between devices is what we call Rapid Session Shift, which helps facilitate communication on-the-move, improving collaboration and employee efficiency alongside the employee experience. And solutions such as our OpenTouch, which delivers all the multimedia, multi-party UC benefits, run on a single server, meaning that costs are significantly reduced – in some cases up to a third of the market price – with lower TCO and payback time, as well as cloud-based delivery, this becomes much more affordable for SMBs and large enterprises alike.
Proving the RoI – hard and soft benefits

While companies, as shown in the Ovum survey, are beginning to understand the benefits of Unified Communications – especially with the increase in mobility and the potential for enterprises here and are starting to set aside budgets for implementation, the real Return on Investment of implementing UC has not been widely documented.

This article goes some way to formalise the ‘soft’ benefits of UC in terms of improved employee efficiency and productivity, as well as faster decision making. And with a wider enterprise focus, UC can lead to quicker time to market as well as reduced project and design time.

The ‘hard’ cash benefits of UC can be seen in many ways – in the ability to manage business process latency, resulting in speeding up communications and project conclusions; in the decrease in personal intervention resulting in a reduction in maintenance costs; and of course in the reduction of operational costs in terms of travel, infrastructure and communication.

Communication is essential to every business process, and the real RoI from UC is when it is tied to every business process, helping companies transform their businesses and the way work is carried out and completed, and will help to build competitive differentiation as a result.