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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