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Unified Communications Go Beyond Customer Satisfaction
Aberdeen’s March 2007 report, Improving Customer Satisfaction through Unified Communications, showed that organizations considered “providing their customers with more personalized service” a strategic concern. Bestin- Class respondents to that survey addressed that pressure and achieved measurable improvements in customer satisfaction levels through the accelerated adoption of unified communications solutions.
Aberdeen’s latest research shows the two greatest pressures organizations currently face are the continued need to have timely and high-quality responsiveness to customer needs, as well as managing a decentralized workforce (Figure 1). At first glance, these two issues may not seem interconnected, but closer scrutiny reveals they are very much intertwined. While customer service remains paramount, the increasingly fluid and competitive global market drives organizations to stay as lean and competitive as possible. Specifically, they are looking to increase revenues through advances in flexibility and mobility while simultaneously decreasing the cost of doing that business.
Travel has roared back from its post 9/11 lows to record levels, fueled primarily by corporate travel. Organizations recognize that one of the most important ways to ensure high levels of customer intimacy and satisfaction is through face-to-face interactions. As organizations become more successful and continue to grow, their customer base expands thus requiring even more travel. However, this symbiotic phenomenon is in fact a double-edged sword. An organization’s success eventually leads to the need for increased travel to ensure appropriate levels of customer care.
This enhanced travel requirement also drives the need to more effectively mobilize an organization’s workforce, thereby allowing employees to 1) be more responsive to both internal and external customer needs; 2) share information with colleagues, partners, and customers more as a means of increasing collaboration; and 3) thus help increase the flexibility of internally and market-facing employees.
The Maturity Class Framework
The value of any solution – let alone a unified communications solution – must be tied to the quantifiable results it can deliver to an organization. This has been one of the greatest challenges surrounding unified communications because of the challenge in defining and quantifying workforce productivity. Aberdeen used three key performance criteria to distinguish Best-in-Class companies from Industry Average and Laggard organizations. These KPIs are some of the time-sensitive operational metrics most frequently touted as key factors in measuring an organization’s (and its employees’) effectiveness and productivity: (1) responsiveness to others; (2) employees’ ability to gain knowledge / data from others; and (3) the overall flexibility of an organization’s workforce. Table 1 summarizes Aberdeen’s findings and defines Best-in-Class performance for this study.
The Returns from Best-in-Class Performance
Figure 2 shows how a policy driven strategy incorporating both fixed and mobile UC solutions directed at enhancing workforce productivity can provide tremendous benefits to an organization. Best-in-Class organizations spent, on average, considerably more than what all other organizations invested on UC solutions. That upfront investment has paid off handsomely over the last 12 months. In fact, the larger investments in UC solutions translated into a 67% relative increase in top line revenue and a 50% relative increase in the overall profitability of the organization. To achieve that level of performance, the Best-in-Class actions in Table 2 show that top performing organizations place the most emphasis on leveraging their technology enablers as a means to an end - not as an end of its own. In fact, Best-in-Class organizations are more likely than all others to leverage technologies to create a borderless office (i.e. mobilizing the workforce) to enhance that productivity. Figure 3 illustrates how those organizations strategically approach the challenges illustrated in Figure 1.
Competitive Assessment
The aggregated performance of surveyed companies determined whether they ranked as Best-in-Class, Industry Average, or Laggard. In addition to having common performance levels, each class also shared characteristics in five key categories: (1) process (the ability to detect and respond to changing conditions without placing additional burdens on the organization); (2) organization (corporate focus and collaboration among stakeholders); (3) knowledge management (contextualizing data and exposing it to key stakeholders); (4) technology (the selection of appropriate tools and the intelligent deployment of those tools); and (5) performance measurement (the ability of the organization to measure the benefits of technology deployment and use the results to improve key processes further).
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