By Brian Ferguson
Those of us spending all of our waking hours in theUnified Communications (UC) industry can’t help but get excited about the great things that UC can do for a company. Whether it’s collaboration using screen sharing, audio/video conferencing, instant messaging, mobility tools (including iOS and Android apps), or presence management, it’s hard not to see how UC is changing the way a business communicates, both internally and to their customers. Even with all of these advantages, the overall adoption rate of UC by organizations has been slower than projected. Adoption rates increased by only 2 percent since 2011, to its current rate of 38 percent in 2013, according to InformationWeek’s annual State of Unified Communications report. How can this be?
The survey points out that there are three dominant barriers to UC implementation for most companies:
- Other projects have a higher priority
- No definitive business value recognized
- Lack of in-house expertise
After digesting this report, one thing is clear. In order to successfully offer UC to your customer base, you must have a strategy mapped out to overcome those three key objections. Here are some tips to help you, as a UC provider, clear those hurdles.
Other Projects Have Higher Priority and/or No Definitive Business Value
Unless the company has some sort of emergency that must be dealt with immediately, the first two objections (other priorities and no business value) are often the same thing. In this case, the company does not see enough value in UC to justify the cost. The decision makers have seen the useful features, but don’t see enough monetary benefit to move it to the top of the priority list above other projects.
How do you help decision makers move the UC project to the top? To make the case, you must be able to quantify the benefits of the UC system. “Quantifying” is more than just adding up the cost savings from changing to a SIP provider or lowering yearly maintenance costs. Here are some questions that can be asked to help quantify the benefit of UC:
- How much money can you save on wireless bills by moving all of your mobile business traffic to WiFi?
- How much productivity dollars can you save by having an accurate way to track the workload of your mobile sales force?
- What is the average value of a sales opportunity for your company and how many more opportunities could you close if you were able to integrate a third-party piece of software into your phone system and have valuable customer information available on every phone call?
- How much money could your company save on travel since the on-site meeting load can be significantly minimized with UC?
- Is it possible to eliminate a job role by routing calls from multiple locations to a central answering center? How much would you save?
Asking these types of questions, and then backing up the numbers through case studies and references, can help you monetize the full value of UC and help move it to the top of the project list.
Lack of In-House Expertise
When dealing with the third common objection, refusing to adopt UC because of lack of in-house expertise, there are four ways to overcome the concern:
- Sell the value of your services as a Value Added Reseller: There is no need for an in-house expert when you can be that for them.
- Reevaluate the UC system you are offering: UC does not have to be complex. Many of today’s UC systems have very simple-to-use GUIs and mobile applications that make UC adoption incredibly easy. In this case, being able to properly demo the ease of use of your UC offering is key.
- Solid training programs: Whether you are taking advantage of vendor provided training for users and administrators, or offering your own custom training, having a solid training program in place is crucial. Train the trainer programs work really well for companies with IT departments. As an added bonus, training may also mean an additional revenue opportunity for you.
- Offer a cloud option: Though UC in general is growing slowly, UC as a Service (UCaaS) is booming. UCaaS takes much of the day-to-day maintenance out of the hands of the customer, making it easier for them to manage. Plus, there’s nothing wrong with monthly revenue commissions that you, as a VAR, can gain by offering a cloud option.
The features and functionality that UC can bring to a company are too good and too valuable to be missed. If you can consistently make the case for UC, then adoption rates may just increase by the time next year’s industry reports roll out. More importantly, if you become an expert at quantifying the benefits UC and taking away the need for creating in-house experts, you will be well on your way to a successful Unified Communications business in 2014.
Brian Ferguson is a product marketing manager at Digium, which provides Asterisk® software, telephony hardware and Switchvox business phone systems that deliver enterprise-class Unified Communications.
