Three Steps to Justify Your Organization’s Financial Investment in Unified Communications

Selling a Unified Communications (UC) strategy to your corporate executives may take some effort, but with a business-savvy approach and solid research to back up your case, you can get management to underwrite a solution that will improve the way your organization does business at every level. Irwin Lazar, principal research analyst at Nemertes Research, offers a few suggestions for selling management on UC’s ability to create visibility into the availability of colleagues and partners whose collaboration via email, instant messaging (IM), Web conferencing and other applications is critical in completing transactions.

1. Demonstrate a grasp of your organization’s own processes. “The key is to understand the nature of the business and looking for processes in the business that could benefit from UC,” Lazar says.

As an example, show corporate management a list of steps required to take orders, pointing out any delays along the way. “Once the order leaves customer service, it often gets bogged down by a day or more waiting for credit approval,” you might explain. “If we had the ability to identify someone in accounts receivable who is able to approve the order right away, we could shrink the time from order-taking to shipment by a day or more, which would result in quicker inventory turn, better rates from our shippers and greater customer satisfaction.” Use examples specific to your own industry and your own company to make UC’s benefits more concrete to those corporate managers who approve IT investments.

Broadly speaking, “IT must become more aware of business process than it historically has been,” notes Lazar. IT should speak in terms of actual business processes rather than IT jargon whenever possible. “If at the end of the day, IT can’t show how the business will save or make money with a particular project, then the project won’t succeed.”

2. Take small steps towards a larger business case. “You will be better able to deal with integration and management challenges of unified communications if you can demonstrate a quantifiable productivity increase,” Lazar says. Consider Web conferencing and instant-messaging: two components of an overall UC strategy that may already be in regular use at your organization. Discuss these capabilities and the productivity benefits they have afforded users in your organization to make a case for investing in a broader UC strategy.

The same incremental approach applies to your description of specific business processes. By understanding each of the steps involved in a single customer interaction—from the length of time required to complete an action, to the roles of all personnel involved in each action, to the script used to up-sell a customer during a specific interaction—you can build a solid case for a communications strategy that will shave time off each step.

3. Design and run a UC pilot. In larger organizations, Lazar says, IT or a qualified solutions provider partner can create a pilot UC system that gives a segment of users a taste of UC benefits.

Consider designating a control group who will engage with customers using current standard operating procedures. You’ll compare this group’s interactions—the length of time called for in each step of the transaction, the speed with which steps follow one another, the outcome (sale, no sale, postponement, etc.)—with a second group taking part in the UC pilot. By comparing data points—such as the amount of time it took to locate someone to answer a question a customer had, or how rapidly a call was transferred to a member of the help desk or a person in field support—you will have evidence of places where inconsistent methods of reaching colleagues resulted in lost time, fewer sales and decreased customer satisfaction.

The best pilots, typically run over a period of several months, are followed by a survey that asks users open-ended, qualitative questions such as:

• How much time do you estimate using the pilot UC system saved you on communications tasks?
• Where did you see gains in your own productivity during this pilot week? In your team’s productivity?
• What capabilities of the UC system did you use most? Use least?

Users may answer these survey questions with descriptions of direct benefits—such as “I was able to get answers more quickly from the sales team when prospects called with questions” or “I did not have to waste time tracking down someone from the marketing group; I knew they were all in a meeting together until noon”—or with indirect benefits (“We were able to pool all of our medical personnel so none felt the burden of being on call; doing so decreased our staff turnover.”). Carefully document what the users say, because their responses and opinions regarding how the UC pilot helped them work more efficiently is the most valuable tool you have as you seek to demonstrate UC’s tangible benefits to management and to justify future expenditures.