Why the Unified Communications industry leads to bad business decisions

As 2020 trudges on, our company continues to be knee deep in helping organizations navigate where they should be investing their time and hard-earned dollars as they relate to Unified Communications (UC). And whether they are trying to make amends for what this year has handed the business world, from engaging in previously shelved digital transformation initiatives, to just simply trying to understand the current state of affairs of their own infrastructure—regardless the reason, the constant is the need for better infrastructure paired with actionable data to support overall decisions.

For instance, financial decisions are currently at the top of everyone’s mind. Cost cutting, cost savings, and reallocation of funds are the common themes throughout the majority of our engagements. Oddly, the single greatest factor that many organizations are not able to calculate are the myriad of costs associated with their daily business activities.

As it pertains to UC, it’s shocking to see what many companies spend on downright useless and mundane tasks—and there are hundreds of them. Case in point, simply think of the time and cost of a senior UC engineer taking time out of a busy day to find and configure a phone. Seriously? Do that configuration 20 times per year and costs begin to climb exponentially. But that’s just the silly stuff.

Accounting for more tangible aspects such as data center associated costs, all the way down to unused phones and licensees, every single aspect adds up to too much time, effort, and money being spent. In fact, on average—and I’m talking about a typical 1,000 person company—we are helping it find and reallocate $100,000+ in budget in a matter of hours. How can that be? It would seem that very few, if anyone, in our industry has taken the time to create a process to define and calculate all the costs usually associated with UC expenditure.

However, this is where it gets worse. Making bad financial decisions based on insufficient data in turn immediately leads to bad business decisions—meaning projects begin to stall due to funding challenges, which in turn result in more potential market losses, all the way through to substantial revenue loss. Again, a situation that could be avoided if the correct steps were taken to calculate costs in a way that would shift budgets to bigger and better things.

More so, for every company we engage with we hear the results of misinformation, misunderstandings, and miscommunications as they relate to previous UC choices and what they actually cost. It seems that every time a potential new customer comes to us with a preconceived idea that cloud is too expensive, or even hosted UC is too expensive, they are usually hundreds of thousands of dollars off in their calculations.

That’s not their fault. The UC industry has done a disservice by not addressing the core topics nor the expenses long before infrastructure even enters the equation. For instance, the industry seems to be guilty of being exclusively focused on the topic of “what” technology, but no one ever talks about the “how” using and operating it impacts the business. The calculations of “what could be” are never being made, or even contemplated.

There’s always more to any story than meets the eye, and UC infrastructure is by no means immune to that. If you’re interested—perhaps even morbidly curious—to see just how much you’re spending versus what you think you’re spending, let us walk you through our business modeling process. It only takes 15 to 30 minutes (we have this down to a science).

And I promise we will make it simple and easy for you—no hard math on your part required. You have nothing to lose and, at the very least, data points to gain.