Business Communications Beyond The Desktop: Cost and Productivity Improvements

Business communications challenges can affect both profitability and customer/partner relationships, especially as employees' workspaces extend beyond the traditional desktop environment. As workers become increasingly mobile and begin to conduct business from a variety of locations, four primary challenges arise:

"Businesses in which PCs are not prevalent for each worker, such as manufacturing, healthcare, or retail, would benefit from an intelligent phone. An intelligent phone used for database information access as an alternative to a PC is likely to be less costly to own, operate, and maintain, and far easier to interact with."

Allan Sulkin, President and chief analyst with TEQConsult Group and a 25-year consultant on telecommunications technology.

Communication-caused delay and disruption
Communications complexity affects long-term productivity, business communications process reform, and financial performance
Decision-support outcomes suffer from inability to access and collaborate effectively with primary players
Resources are underused or misallocated because of the complexity of communication

The failure to address business communications challenges in the new extended workspace inflicts real penalties: A 2005 Sage Research study discovered that 22 percent of the organizations it polled reported experiencing business communication-caused delays on a monthly basis, while 13 perecent said such delays happen every week.

Business Communications Require Even More Flexibility

After massive investments in technologies and devices, organizations demand ways of simplifying business communications not only for their mobile and distributed workforce, but also for traditional office employees whose workspace has expanded to encompass conference rooms, campuses, airports, warehouses, and other facilities. Companies must improve communication flows, so that employees can access primary decision makers quickly, enhance collaboration, and improve productivity to positively affect their business.

Companies that can flexibly and productively manage business communications in a multi-device, mobile, and distributed environment:

Extend the workspace beyond its traditional desktop-bound limitations
Speed access and improve communication
Integrate different device modes and communication applications
Dramatically improve collaboration
Streamline business processes, reach the right resource the first time, and enhance profitability

Cisco unified communications solutions provide an integrated communications strategy and architecture, helping enable the secure combination of voice, video, data and mobility applications within an integrated and intelligent network. They support employees' ability to collaborate every time, everywhere, everyone's included.

Business Communications Benefits Add Up

As unified communications applications become more prevalent in the extended workspace, more organizations are also realizing the associated benefits. Results documented by Sage Research demonstrate a multitude of benefits—both in terms of employee time savings and financial savings. Unified business communications applications not only facilitate productivity improvements for employees wherever their work takes them, they can also enhance the way in which all employees communicate.

Organizations using unified communications clients saved an average of 32 minutes daily per employee because presence technology enabled staff to reach one another on the first try.
Use of softphones resulted in an average savings of $1,727 per month in cell phone and long distance charges. Mobile workers also saved 40 minutes each day, enjoyed greater business communications convenience, and generated annual productivity gains of 3.5 days per year through business continuity impact.
Organizations using unified messaging reported that employees saved 43 minutes per day from more efficient message management while mobile workers saved 55 minutes per day.
Companies using integrated voice and Web conferencing reported a 30 percent reduction in conferencing expenses (by making integrated conferencing capabilities available in-house and on-network) and an average savings of $1,700 per month in travel costs.

For others, the savings may simply come from having reduced hardware requirements and operating expenses.

And in today's dynamic business environment, perhaps the most important benefit comes from having a communications system that can change and grow at a moment's notice, enabling new capabilities for more effective business communications, employee mobility, streamlining business processes, and improving profitability.