How to Track Savings for Unified Communications

You’ve made the decision to switch to unified communications (UC) for a number of reasons, one of the major points being that you know it will save your organization money over time. You’re in good company because thousands of companies today are installing UC solutions because they want to improve their collaboration efforts while keeping their costs under control. It’s a wise strategy because research suggests that replacing multiple vendors and a traditional phone system with a single-vendor option offers both significant cost savings as well as improved communication processes.

So you know all this to be true, but how do you know it’s actually producing these results for your business?

Ensure Your Plan is Actually Unified

At the core, unified communications is the process your workforce uses to seamlessly connect and communicate with each other regardless of location or device. This occurs through voice, instant messaging, email, video or conferencing. A truly unified solution should empower your staff to use each of these communications methods through a single interface. To do so, the UC solution should have an escalation process that can provide employees with the ability to easily transfer from using the phone to instant messaging, or they are easily able to pull in others to existing conference calls without having to transfer to another platform to do so.

Identify Your Cost-Savings Elements

Although robust and powerful, most UC solutions do not provide any reporting or analysis tools in order to track the adoption rates and cost savings. Because each business functions differently, it’s important to identify what your organization’s costs were to implement and maintain your UC solution. You can break this down into three main areas:

Out-of-Pocket Expenses and Considerations:

• Have you removed the need for an external conferencing platform?
• Have you eliminated the excess costs from long distance and toll costs?
• Are you utilizing IM instead of calling services?
• Is there a decrease in facility costs because of a more mobile workforce?

Productivity

• Ease of use and rapid access to key communication tools
• Improved business processes
• Simplified tasks for increased productivity
• Click-to-communicate accelerates access to important information
• Reduces wait time for email and phone call responses

Optimizing Processes

• Track and monitor where UC tools were used on revenue building opportunities
• Identify when UC is being utilized to enhance communications between customers, suppliers, and partners.
• Calculate when UC was utilized in producing more rapid order processes, status updates, and customer service.

Mitel Connect and ROI

At Millennia Technologies, we realize there are a lot of choices out there for unified communications. We have partnered with Mitel because we believe Mitel Connect delivers reliability, scalability and user-friendly features that can’t be found with any other UC solution. Mitel Connect is also leading the industry on the total cost of ownership. Contact us today to see how you can start experiencing measurable ROI results through increased productivity, enhanced IT efficiency, higher team effectiveness, and better customer service with Mitel and Millennia Technologies.