Unified Access Switching

Business Communications: Cost and Productivity Improvements
Business communications challenges can affect both profitability and customer/partner relationships. Four ‎primary challenges include:

‎Communications complexity affects long-term productivity, business process reform, and financial performance ‎
Decision-support outcomes suffer from inability to access and collaborate effectively with primary players ‎
Resources are underused or misallocated because of the complexity of communication ‎

The failure to address business communications challenges inflicts real penalties: A 2005 Sage Research study ‎discovered that 22% of the organizations it polled reported experiencing business communication-caused ‎delays on a monthly basis, while 13% said such delays happen every week.

Business Communications Today Require Flexibility
After massive investments in technologies and devices, organizations demand ways of simplifying business ‎communications for their mobile and distributed workforce to improve communication flows, access primary ‎decision makers quickly, enhance collaboration, and improve productivity to positively affect their business.

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The means to flexibly and productively manage business communications in a multi-device, mobile, ‎and distributed environment: ‎

Speeds access and improves communication ‎
Integrates different device modes and communication applications ‎
Dramatically improve collaboration ‎
Allows organizations to streamline business processes, reach the right resource the first time, and enhance profitability. ‎

Cisco business communications solutions provide an integrated communications strategy and architecture, ‎helping enable the secure combination of voice, video, and collaborative data applications within an integrated ‎and intelligent network. ‎

Business Communications Benefits Add Up
As unified communications applications become more prevalent in the workplace, more organizations are also ‎realizing the associated benefits. Results documented by Sage Research demonstrate a multitude of benefits—‎both in terms of employee time savings and financial savings. Unified communications applications not only ‎facilitate productivity improvements for mobile employees, they can also enhance the way in which all ‎employees communicate.

Organizations using unified communications clients saved an average of 32 minutes daily per employee because presence ‎technology enabled staff to reach one another on the first try. ‎
Use of softphones resulted in an average savings of $1,727 per month in cell phone and long distance charges. Mobile ‎workers also saved 40 minutes each day, enjoyed greater communications convenience, and generated annual productivity gains of ‎‎3.5 days per year through business continuity impact. ‎
Organizations using unified messaging reported that employees saved 43 minutes per day from more efficient message ‎management while mobile workers saved 55 minutes per day. ‎
Companies using integrated voice and Web conferencing reported a 30% reduction in conferencing expenses (by making ‎integrated conferencing capabilities available in-house and on-network) and an average savings of $1,700 per month in travel ‎costs. ‎

For others, the savings may simply come from having reduced hardware requirements and operating expenses. ‎

And in today's dynamic business environment, perhaps the most important benefit comes from having a phone ‎system that can change and grow at a moment's notice, enabling new capabilities for more effective ‎communications, streamlining business processes, and improving profitability. ‎