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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:
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 percent said such delays happen every week.
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:
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.
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.
Greater Productivity - click here to review results on Cisco Unified Communications:
“We estimate that Cisco IP Communicator helps increase productivity by three to five hours a week per user,” says Williams. These results are consistent with independent studies. For example, a Sage Research study conducted in September 2005 reported that 90 percent of organizations using softphones realized time savings for traveling employees, an average of 40 minutes per day.
The most valuable productivity features for mobile employees include three-way calling, conferencing, 5-digit dialing, and being reachable at their local extensions while traveling. Traveling employees can conveniently access back-end services such as sales support by touching soft keys on Cisco IP Communicator, just as they could using a Cisco IP phone at the office.
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