Landmark study reveals true cost of non-unified communications
1 min read
Businesses with more than 1,000 employees are on average wasting nearly $13 million yearly in avoidable expenses and lost productivity, according to a US and European study by Insignia Research of Canada.
Its huge end-user survey, commissioned by Siemens Enterprise Communications, reveals huge costs, workflow disruptions and frustrations caused primarily by what it describes as “the silent but staggering true costs of fragmented communications”.
The report – Measuring the Pain: What Is Fragmented Communication Costing Your Enterprise? – attempts to quantify the costs of the status quo. It covers workflow problesm and the associated costs and frustration to enterprises lacking unified communications at the individual, team and enterprise levels.
Key findings include 94% of respondents reported waiting an average of 5.3 hours per week on information from others to complete tasks. In 1,000-employee enterprises this can translate to more than $9 million yearly in lost productivity, based on a $37 weighted hourly wage, says the report.
Taking a process view, it adds, the negative impact of 5.3-hour delays in customer-facing activities has larger implications on customer sales, service and revenue realisation.
Beyond that, the survey shows an average productivity loss of 7.8 hours per month at offsite locations because they lack the communication tools of the main office. It finds that nearly a full day per month is lost because they are not properly equipped with effective, remotely-accessible collaborative communications systems.
As workers become increasingly mobile, the net effect of this can be dramatic, suggests the report. Fully weighted, it estimates that the annual 1,000-person enterprise cost exceeds $3 million. And it adds that companies are wasting at least $3,400 per person each year in unnecessary business travel for the same reasons.
“Never before has a study so clearly captured the extent of the frustration felt by individuals, managers and teams, and so completely quantified the extraneous costs leaking out of the enterprise as a result,” says Jim Burton, principal of UC Strategies, a market research firm specialising in communications. “Aside from the hard costs uncovered in the survey, there are soft but very real costs in terms of customer responsiveness and satisfaction.”
The solution, he believes, is an enterprise-wide, unified communications platform like the Siemens Open Communications architecture, designed to unify enterprise communications, with fixed-mobile convenience.
