Adding Value with UC
How exactly can UC add value to the business?? It starts with asking some questions about the business:
- "Could my organization increase revenue if we reduced the amount of time it took to close a deal? Enter an order? Update an order? Process a request? Resolve an issue"
- "Could my organization increase customer satisfaction if we provided more timely and accurate information to clients?"
- "Could my organization increase employee satisfaction if we had more flexibility in how and where employees could work? Simplified the number of hoops they need to jump through?"
Answer those questions and approximate a value as to how much revenue, how much customer sat, how much employee sat, and you’ve build an effective business case for UC because you are creating a solution to communications problems.
That’s all nice at a philosophical level. Let me take this one step closer to everyday usage by showing an example of how UC can increase revenue by reducing the amount of time it takes to close a deal.
Fake Case Study
Background:
- Contoso (sorry, I’m not feeling creative!) Manufacturing sells electronics components and related products with an average deal size of $1000.
- They have a 1000-person, distributed, mobile sales force.
- Sales people are out visiting customers and working from home 90% of the time.
- Sales visits consist of talking to a customer about potential needs for new products then writing down the parts and quantities
- Sales people go home, boot up their laptop, VPN in, open the order entry tool, enter the order, then shut down and go to the next client visit
- OR – they visit all their customers during the day, then enter the orders in all at once during the evening
Challenge:
- Reduce the amount of time it takes for a sales person to enter an order or update an existing order
- Provide customers with accurate, up-to-the-minute information about their orders
Expected results
- Increase average number of deals per month from 10 to 11
- Increase customer satisfaction
Solution
- We tie OCS into the order entry system.
- Each sales person already has a BlackBerry or Windows Mobile phone with the OCS Mobile client
- Use the OCS SDK to write a middle-ware application that passes IM from OCS to the order entry system
- Show sales force how to send an IM to orders@contosos.com to query the status of an order to send a new order in.
Value to the business:
- 1000 sales people closing $1000 more business each week for 52 weeks: $5.2 million dollars
- Customer satisfaction increases, resulting in the addition of 1 new customer a year, for each of the 1000 reps: 1000 new customers x $10,000 average spend = $10.0 million dollars
- Total value: $15.2 million dollars
To me, this is value: use the existing order entry system, use the ubiquitous mobile phones that people already have, but now use them together! No need to write a new client for the mobile phone for your order entry system: just use your IM client. All the magic happens on the back end by tying the OCS server into the Order Entry database with the OCS SDK.
I realize that this sounds like smoke and mirrors at best, and a gnarly (in the bad sense) development quagmire. So let me cut to it and show you a demo, below.
Link to flash demo
This took about 2 days of collaboration between one of our .Net gurus and me to put the demo together. Obviously you could pretty up the menu options, change the formatting, add functionality. But you get the idea – use this stuff to make business happen!!
I’d love to hear other ideas that people have for business integration.
