Struggling to calculate UC management ROI?
Unified Communications (UC) platforms have become the backbone of modern business operations – aligning conversations, people, and data in the world of hybrid work. Just look at the latest market reports – currently, experts predict that the market will grow at a CAGR of 17.4% until 2030.
UC isn’t going anywhere, but companies are still struggling to manage their ecosystems effectively. Countless organizations are juggling endless software subscriptions, vendors, and disconnected dashboards at once – and it’s causing real problems.
Poor UC service management isn’t just a headache for IT teams. It’s an issue that has a direct impact on employee engagement, revenue, and productivity.
If your teams can’t communicate effectively, everything crumbles, and simply “reacting” to issues as they happen isn’t enough. Companies need to get one step ahead. Here’s what you really need to know about the impact of effective UC management on business performance.
UC Management ROI: The Hidden Costs of Poor Service Management
A fragmented approach to UC management drains budget, productivity, and resources. If you’re unsure about UC management ROI, just look at everything you miss out on without a comprehensive way to maintain visibility and control over your systems. You lack
- Tools to streamline time-consuming (and expensive) onboarding and offboarding tasks.
- A way to cut down on repetitive tasks for IT administrators (so you spend more on labor).
- Insights into the licenses and resources your teams actually use.
- Reliable solutions for managing assets, from endpoints, to software systems.
- Ways to proactively address issues before they affect your team.
That last point is critical. If you’re not proactively identifying and addressing problems, you’re exposing yourself to more unexpected downtime. Since Gartner suggests the average cost of network downtime is about $5,600 per minute – every second matters.
Here’s a closer look at the three most significant side-effects of poor UC performance.
Lost Productivity = Lost Revenue
Communication and productivity go hand-in-hand. If your teams can’t connect (particularly in the hybrid world), they can’t complete tasks, innovate, and problem solve. A single outage in your UC platform that prevents teams from communicating could mean that sales teams can’t work together on converting a lead, or marketing teams fall behind on trends.
Even customer service teams could end up leaving customers on hold – struggling to access the subject matter experts needed to address issues. The result is expensive downtime across every sector of the business. UC management ROI issues compound when IT teams don’t have a central environment for tracking, troubleshooting, and fixing problems.
They can waste hours fixing an issue that would have taken seconds to address with an intelligent system, the right insights, and even AI self-healing tools. They may not even see an issue emerging until it’s already had a major impact on team productivity and engagement.
Employee Frustration and Burnout
One of the reasons UC platforms are so crucial today is that they bridge the gaps between disconnected workers – office-based, remote, and field-based teams. Employees now use their UC platforms as their digital workplace – and if they can’t access reliable tools, everything grinds to a halt. This doesn’t just lead to serious dips in productivity.
When employees are constantly grappling with interruptions and outages, frustration mounts. Studies have shown that 51% of employees think bad communication increases their stress levels – leading to burnout and disengagement. When problems persist, eventually, staff members abandon ship, leaving companies to deal with the costs and disruptions of regular turnover.
Even if employees do stick around, they end up spending more time trying to fix problems or simply accessing the tools they need than they do completing crucial tasks. Staff start focusing on “catching up” – and the business falls behind.
Higher Operational Costs
Beyond the immediate consequences of downtime and employee dissatisfaction, another major drain on UC management ROI is inefficient budget management. Without UC service management tools that align various software solutions, vendors, and licenses into one trackable system, teams often lose insight into which services their employees use.
That means they spend more on unnecessary licenses and products they don’t need. According to Nermertes’ research, companies that use dedicated UC management solutions spend an average of $933 per endpoint per year in operational costs – compared to $1,303 for those using only the standard tools provided by their UC platform vendor.
That doesn’t even account for the costs of duplicate licenses or unnecessary software. On top of that, the manual processes involved in “reactive management” – such as traditional troubleshooting, drain IT resources and budgets even further.
UC Management ROI: The Benefits of UCSM
Moving from a reactive, disjointed strategy to a proactive approach to managing services, with UCSM (UC Service Management) tools, drives measurable results. With effective UC management, ROI comes from improved employee experiences, enhanced productivity, and data-driven budget management. For instance:
Boosting Revenue Opportunities
When companies manage UC services proactively, constantly searching for problems and addressing them before they have a negative impact, revenue grows. Effective UC service management tools empower companies to maintain visibility into all of their platforms and systems at once.
They can use AI and ML tools to predict potential issues and outages before they happen, and even use intelligent self-healing features to quickly resolve issues. This leads to a significant boost in productivity – because teams can constantly access the resources they need to thrive.
For instance, Arrivia found that by using a UCSM platform, they not only made their agents 50% more productive, but also saved the IT team up to four hours on troubleshooting tasks. Plus, because teams can collaborate more consistently, that opens the door to faster innovation, problem solving, and new growth opportunities.
Enhancing Employee Experience
Effective UC service management ensures every employee (wherever they are) can access seamless, reliable communication and collaboration tools. Modern UC management platforms streamline the employee experience – not just by helping companies to address issues proactively.
They also help companies to streamline common tasks, like onboarding and offboarding staff with zero-touch provisioning solutions. They can give teams access to self-service portals, where they can address common problems (like resetting passwords) without waiting for an IT admin.
When it comes to UC management ROI, happier employees are more productive, and profitable team members. They’re also less likely to burn out or abandon your business, cutting recruitment and training costs. Everybody wins.
Optimizing Budget Management
Leading UCSM platforms, such as those from VOSS and Nuwave, don’t just align UC systems and make provisioning or troubleshooting easier. They help companies make the most of their budgets. With detailed insights into usage patterns, call quality, endpoint performance, and more, companies can make better decisions that lead to a healthier budget and improved UC management ROI.
With the right tools, you can instantly identify unused licensed resources, find strategies to optimize network bandwidth, and even uncover opportunities to consolidate services or renegotiate vendor contracts. In other words, you find ways to accomplish more with less.
You can also cut operational costs by automating tasks with self-healing networks, AI-powered tools for troubleshooting, and zero-touch provisioning workflows.
UC Management ROI: The Reality
Today’s enterprise leaders need to realize that UC service management isn’t just an IT issue. Making sure you’re taking a proactive approach to keeping your communication and collaboration systems running smoothly is a business-critical necessity.
Investing in intuitive UCSM platforms significantly reduces operational costs, improves employee productivity (and therefore revenue), and keeps your employees happy, all at the same time.
Stop losing time, money, and employees because of poor UC management. Learn all about why UCSM solutions matter to businesses in this UC service management guide, and discover how you can turbocharge results with this article on proactive UC management strategies.
This post originally appeared on Service Management - Enterprise - Channel News - UC Today.