So Tell Me, Where Does It Hurt?

Business Area

Issues or Pain Today That Could Be Solved by Unified Communications

• Employees wasting time trying to coordinate communications
• Poor access to key employees for decision making
• Slowness to decisions and market
• Poor retention of key employees due to inadequate tools (this is especially important with the generation that has grown up with technology and expects adequate tools)

• Additional costs of maintaining multiple communications systems
• Travel costs spinning out of control
• Mobile phone costs increasing
• Poor visibility into sales, cash flow, and inventory due to disconnection between sales, suppliers, manufacturing, and delivery
• Difficulty providing accurate financial reporting due to poor reporting from the field
• Difficulties in documenting compliance with internal and external regulations

• Inability to contact key employees at the time they’re needed
• Customer difficulty reaching sales representatives easily
• No way for sales representatives to easily check on inventories or capabilities while on sales calls
• Access to key technical resources in the field limited by budgetary and resource constraints

• Inability to quickly contact and coordinate corporate communications during a PR emergency
• New products time to market slowed due to the inability to coordinate key employees
• Webinars, virtual conferences, and solution offerings can’t be provided or require costly third-party systems to produce

• Customers are unable to contact customer service through standard means such as IM, resulting in a slower time to resolution
• Resolution of customer problems is delayed because of the inability to contact key internal personnel
• Customer service representatives are tied to their desktop because they can’t provide services remotely

• Recruitment is difficult because ineffective communications systems are a turn-off for new employees
• Training remote groups effectively is difficult because of inadequate technology
• Turnover is high due to the inability to bring a sense of belonging or involvement to remote employees

• Managing remote teams and projects is difficult because of inadequate technology
• Conference-call meetings are ineffective because participants can’t communicate effectively
• Productivity and quality are impaired because inadequate tools preclude effectively collaborating in real time

• Must support multiple skill sets to maintain multiple communications and collaboration systems
• Constant need to reduce the costs of existing communications devices and means

• Must provide auditing of all types of communications, including IM
• Must comply with regulations requiring that confidential data is not hosted on a third-party system
• Must provide “ethical walls” of communications, preventing groups of employees from communicating with one another
• Must provide proof of end-to-end compliance with auditing requirements
• Must be able to easily comply with subpoena requesting information across multiple systems