This TCO guide will help you evaluate the cost savings from integrated business communications and calculate the hard and soft benefits you can achieve.
Your IT team has put a great deal of work into evaluating and understanding various Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) solutions that meet your organizations' needs. But securing funding for strategic priorities, like employee communications tools, is often complex.
Today, CIO's and CFO's are increasingly scrutinising their organization's current infrastructure investments, including upgrades of standalone phone systems and maintaining on-premises video collaboration tools. Two-thirds of IT and finance decision-makers admit that wasteful spending on upkeep projects does not "move the needle."
This Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) guide will help you build credible ROI models and provide an objective financial analysis to justify your move to the cloud with a UCaaS solution.
It’s no exaggeration to say that the growth of UCaaS has exploded over the past two years. For most organizations, the move to UCaaS resulted in lower annual operating costs compared to on-premises and hybrid platforms.
Hanover Research revealed that 89% of organizations chose a UCaaS solution to improve productivity, while 87% opted for UCaaS to enhance employee experiences.
Unified communications are instrumental in customer service, new sales, and team collaboration. However, if you’re still using aging phone systems and legacy video conferencing tools, you could be overpaying and receiving less than stellar performance.
While premise-based unified communications (UC) systems offer full control over the hardware and configurations, they require specialists to provide system maintenance, making it costlier than cloud-based UCaaS communications.
Integrating these legacy UC platforms with popular business apps and CRMs incur substantial manual activity costs. Human error in managing legacy systems can adversely impact staff productivity and risk reputational damage as customer complaints increase.
Trying to wrestle new functionality from on-premises UC tools is expensive and lack the agility and hassle-free advantages of cloud alternatives.
Furthermore, connecting individual vendor platforms and maintaining separate communication tools requires considerable efforts from overburdened IT staff, struggling to make an older system work in the digital world.
While doing nothing may seem like the best choice, maintaining a patchwork of legacy communications is counterproductive when considering the broader implications. These organizations often experience communication outages and unplanned downtime, not to mention potential security threats. Service disruptions cause instant knee-jerk reactions and costly decisions for backup communications.
Today, more employees expect to work from home regularly as businesses switch to hybrid working models. So organizations need a phone system or video collaboration solution that is accessible easily from any location, without the hassle of complex rerouting that wastes time and effort instead of being spent in far more productive ways.
Furthermore, premise-based UC systems don’t offer granular reporting and analytics essential to productivity. Without these insights, it's hard to assess which parts of the organization are working well and where improvements must be made. It also becomes more challenging to plan strategy, training or future upgrades effectively.
Doing nothing in the current business climate is expensive and a step backwards.
Innovation powers today’s world, and speed is the new business currency; that’s why organizations using UCaaS tools see more significant ROI benefits.
89% of organizations reported that a UCaaS solution helped them improve business productivity, 88% chose UCaaS for security attributes, while 87% said UCaaS tools improved the employee experience. (Source: Hanover Research April 2021).
For a significant majority of businesses, taking no action is not an option. Furthermore, 83% of business leaders said that introducing a UCaaS solution integrated with a cloud contact center is vital for their organization’s digital evolution to increase revenue and customer engagement.
