Beware of cost misunderstanding of Unified Communication solution (1)

The Unified Communication solution provides many services, such as instant messaging, email service, and remote video conferencing. These services are based on the concept of enterprises. In addition, the cost of the Unified Communication solution is also very low. However, there are some misunderstandings that we should point out here.
 
According to a survey conducted by CIOs in July this year for 413 IT purchasing managers, 32% of respondents have deployed a Unified Communication solution, another 35% of respondents said they would consider deploying such solutions in the next five years. This means that in the next few years, more than half of enterprises will deploy the Unified Communication technology. It is expected to become one of the most important IT technologies in the enterprise field.
 
ROI misunderstanding of Unified Communication
 
However, some insiders believe that the lucrative ROI promised by Unified Communication solution providers, including Microsoft, is hard to be measured and fulfilled, this may eventually become a major obstacle to the rapid development of the unified communications market.
 
Henry Dewing, analyst at Forrester Research, also pointed out that the cost saved by Unified Communication Theory and the budget overhead that can be reduced theoretically are not necessarily feasible in reality, "Unified Communication may not bring high expected benefits to enterprises ".

Project	Possible return on investment
Video conferencing	Business travel expenses can be significantly reduced
Decentralized Contact Center	Call agents can be distributed based on geographical locations or even work at home, effectively saving office rental expenses
Wait time	Prevent the user from giving up the transaction because the call wait time is too long
Status display	It is easy to arrange appropriate professionals to answer questions and improve human resource efficiency.
Productivity	Reduce the work completion time to complete more work tasks or reduce staff

Expected ROI of Unified Communication

In the Dewing survey, about half of respondents had doubts about the actual commercial value of the Unified Communication solution or had unrealistic hopes for ROI. In his investigation into end users, Dewing said, "they all want Unified Communication to bring three ROI in 12 months. "In most cases, this is obviously an unattainable goal.

ROI vs. communication efficiency

In fact, most enterprises do not perform or are difficult to compare the baseline costs of specific services before and after deployment when deploying a Unified Communication solution. Therefore, for them, calculating a specific Roi is not easy.

For example, Collette does not have accurate data on the ROI for deploying a Unified Communication solution or the resulting cost and expense reduction. In fact, the initial focus of deploying a Unified Communication solution for the company selling tourism and vacation products is not to reduce operating costs, but mainly to upgrade the system functions.