It's important to weigh all the pros and cons of implementing a unified communications solution.
When talking to IT professionals, it often becomes apparent that when it comes to making cost-benefit analyses, they rely on hard operational metrics.
This means that repair time, uptime, number of failures, and voice or quality issues, which are all easy to measure, are important factors to consider when assessing the success of any tool.
Some of the benefits of Unified Communications tools are harder to measure.However, as important as these measurements are, they only tell half of the story. Unified Communications (UC) tools have other direct, intangible benefits at the core of business processes that are being overlooked. Perhaps it is because they are more difficult to measure.
Take, for example, project times. The introduction of a tool that will facilitate communication and collaboration between the workforce will, as a natural result, decrease the amount of time needed to complete projects, therefore increasing the overall productivity of the company.
Customer satisfaction is often a direct beneficiary of a UC platform. Being able to reach customers in a timelier fashion, thanks to having diverse points of contact and multi-device connectivity, will improve overall user experience for clients and customers.
Happy customers positively impact the success of any business.Having a collaboration tool that allows for a more integrated sales process through a UC platform connected to a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software opens the possibility of decreasing closing time, which, in turn allows for more sales leads to be processed, vetted and followed up on.
As with any investment an organization is looking to deploy, a UC tool requires careful consideration. Weighing the pros and cons can be an arduous, but necessary task. The key is to truly make a holistic assessment of the potential benefits of the UC platform. And that includes thinking about the benefits that are not wholly visible at the surface.
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