How are you measuring the value of your communications infrastructure investment? Most investment analyses, especially related to capital-intensive call center or voice communications investments, are offered by solution sales organizations, the communications vendors. These firms emphasize costs through lowering the total ownership cost (“TOC”), or on return on investment (“ROI”). Their end goal is to sell a new solution based on anticipated reduction in operating costs (operating expense or “OPEX” for short.), This sales model is understandable as, customers are not willing to  risk their job on soft metrics. Yet, many of the intangible, soft metric benefits that result from building the right communication infrastructure turn out to more valuable than the more tactical and traditional ROI analyses businesses typically use to base their investment decisions.

A few examples of soft metric-based strategic benefits that were realized for clients deploying VoIP-enabled communication projects include:

• Broader span of control of management (lower middle management OPEX)
• Dramatic increase in revenue per customer service head count
• Acceleration of business including rolling out new services faster, in higher quality and more profitability than previously imaginable
• Reducing customer churn that in and of itself paid for the new VoIP-enabled platform many times over
• Provided automated service options to a rural customer base that was assumed to be resistant to IVR technology. Acceptance rates assumed to gradually grow to 10-12% over three years, immediately jumped to the 30-35% range. In addition, higher customer satisfaction rates freed customer service reps to focus on more complex requests, and promoting new services.

A forty-site enterprise adopted a similar plug-and-play distributed architecture realizing unanticipated strategic benefits such as:

• Business continuity procedures enabled customer service centers in the Southeast to redirect local service calls from Florida to Louisiana during a hurricane. When the same hurricane hit Louisiana 36 hours later; local service calls to both West Florida and the Louisiana service center were redirected to Eastern Florida. Service levels remained in the mid-90% range, higher than was formerly possible during much less dramatic weather.
• The same BC architecture enabled this small division of a Fortune 100 company to play a huge role when the parent company acquired part of a large competitor. The flexible, distributed architecture streamlined the business integration timeline and saved millions of dollars.

Businesses and even the communications systems sales professionals tend to overlook some of the more strategic benefits of updating a firm’s communication infrastructure to VoIP such as:

1. Accelerating the speed of new product/service introductions
2. Vastly improved business continuity and business process capabilities
3. Leveraging smaller management teams across broad geographies and across multiple partners (virtual process optimization)
4. Streamlining mergers and acquisitions

As one seasoned executive said, “The (vendor’s) business case is probably a bunch of nonsense ; but, I am making this investment for the intangibles.” He was correct. The post-implementation ROI proved to be several times better than the pre-investment ROI. Many tactical metrics turned out to be better than anticipated; but the surprise was how many of the “intangibles” turned out to be quite measurable and…tangible.

Later entries will cover more typical, yet tactical, OPEX savings realized by one or more clients.

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As a CTO of a 3rd party telephony monitoring and maintenance  provider, I have learned a lot about how companies like to communicate – both internally and externally. When a customer or a partner’s customer has a problem with their phone system, we need to be able to efficiently communicate with the right individuals, using their preferred method of communication. This can be particularly challenging when their preferred method of communication is the same phone system that is having problems!

This blog will be exploring the different tools and technologies that our customers and partners have adopted to optimize their communication infrastructures. Sometimes I’ll be asking for your feedback – how have you addressed this issue of customer-vendor communication?

A picture is worth a thousand words… or in this case, thousands of dollars in cost savings. One of our customers has 89 sites located around the country that was requiring the equivalent of 8 full time telecom support staff to support the multiple vendors and phone systems in use at each of the sites. We were hired to streamline the maintenance and support of these systems, and within a few months the in-house telecom support staff was reduced to 1.5 employees.

Dramatic improvement in basic maintenance communication was the key to the solution. We gave our customer secure access to a service portal that provided a single ticketing system, a live monitoring dashboard, and extensive per-site documentation that included digital photographs of all the phone systems at each of the sites. Time to resolution of system issues improved considerably. The centralized integrated maintenance system gave the internal telecom staff substantially more time to focus on day-to-day issues and improve their customer satisfaction scores. The maintenance service portal also enabled the internal support staff to submit MAC requests, view performance reports, and nearly eliminate the many phone calls they used to have to make to properly support the multi-vendor communications environment.

As much as I’d like to think that the technology behind the service portal was the sole reason for improving the communication efficiency for this customer, it also required us to understand the customer’s current telecom support process and corporate communication philosophies. We needed to understand the methods and procedures of how our customer communicated currently before we could intelligently advise them on how to begin communicating more effectively. If the customer doesn’t believe you understand their pain, they will unlikely believe that you know how to relieve it.

Thanks for taking the time to read this post.  If you found it useful, please leave a comment, share with your peers, or subscribe to the news feed to have my future posts delivered to your news feed reader.  Tell me what issues you have with your current telecom environment, provider, or customer? What do they do that delights you? Thanks, and let’s keep the lines of communication open…..

If you’re accustomed to reading our blog postings on Windows Live Spaces, you can now find our blog postings at blog.telizent.com. With the move, we’ve upgraded to some great blogging software that will allow you to receive the latest updates via RSS and find older posts more easily by category or subject.

Telizent Communications is an industry leader in the telecommunications industry and over the past 20 years, we’ve accumulated a wealth of experience, knowledge and insight. We’ll be using this blog to share that with you. Our hope is that by helping you and your business become more informed about our industry, you’ll be able to operate faster, smarter and more efficiently.

Thanks for reading and please visit again as we post more information.