Virtual conferencing improves bottom line

Companies who use these capabilities report achieving measurable improvements in their corporate performance including increased business efficiencies and total cost savings.

In today's economy, where companies need to communicate in real time with globally distributed teams and a multinational customer base, conferencing has become a mainstream tool for communication and collaboration. Businesses are finding significant value in terms of desirable business outcomes, cost savings, and environmental sustainability.

As the global supply chain for labour, goods, and services has been flattened and accelerated, it has become more complex, creating an exponential need to communicate and collaborate globally between suppliers, manufacturing, R&D, sales, marketing, finance, and others. Similarly, service oriented organisations, government and education, need to increase their agility and optimise their use of information to serve their clients and constituents most effectively.

Conferencing key to collaboration

Organisations are acknowledging the competitive need to streamline the flow of knowledge and expertise within the enterprise, regardless of where in the world that knowledge and expertise need be applied. In the current economic conditions, the big economic wins will likely go to those companies, and their key partners, that are able to flatten and accelerate their knowledge chains.

Conferencing and collaboration are keystones to accelerating knowledge chains and business processes. Furthermore, organisations are adopting conferencing capabilities because they have significant impact on the business. Organisations use conferencing to enhance business results by communicating and collaborating faster with team members, partners, customers, and everyone in the value chain, often across multiple geographies and time zones.

Benefits

Major areas of improvement include improving productivity and accelerating results among individuals and operational teams. Conferencing and communications solutions allow people to be more productive by making it possible to contact colleagues for information more quickly, to perform project-oriented work more effectively without delays, and to make decisions more rapidly. Operational teams are able to convene the necessary skills and resolve issues much more quickly.

Sales staff can be more productive when they are talking to customers and potential customers via conferencing versus spending a significant amount of time travelling. Clearly some in-person interaction is required, but conferencing and communications solutions enable sales persons to reach more people more rapidly and to close more deals than ever before.

Suits Generations X & Y

The new generation of worker has grown up with instant messaging, presence, rich media, and Web/video conferencing and look upon the availability of these tools as a must have in both their work and private life. Work is no longer where one goes, it is what one does, and working moments regularly occur outside of normal business hours and away from normal business settings.

Along with efficiency and productivity gains, reducing costs is another key reason why enterprises adopt collaborative communications. Web and videoconferencing, as well as other UC (unified communications) capabilities, can connect participants with meetings, training, or “events” when they do not necessarily need to be physically present.

The use of multi-party video is proving a very valuable tool for organisations that have implemented travel restrictions or just want to be more efficient. Video conferencing provides individuals with a rich sense of interaction without the need to travel. Several companies have reported that in a video meeting, participants pay more attention than in a Web conference alone because they know others are watching them and how they react to the information being discussed.

Savings on travel & call centres

Some companies are realising that tremendous savings can occur if employees are able to work from home or from less expensive locations. Conferencing tools enable these teleworkers to effectively join meetings and participate in collaborative projects from their home location. Other companies are reducing facility costs in new and existing locations by eliminating headcount at expensive facilities and instead using “remote” personnel who are instantly available over voice, video, and/or web.

One can also resolve customer issues more quickly at lower cost. Call centres have long had escalation procedures so that customer inquiries can be responded to rapidly. The ability for customer facing personnel to see the presence of their colleagues and instantly bring them into a meeting or launch a multi-party conference with subject matter experts allows customer issues to be resolved more quickly, which in turn reduces the cost of maintaining the customer.

Flexible options

A key element of a UC and conferencing deployment is its ability to integrate with existing directories, messaging systems and telephony infrastructure. Organisations can simplify the management of collaborative capabilities, optimise their IT resources, and eliminate silos with the increased flexibility of a premise-based software conferencing solution.

Conferencing, collaboration, and communications are all moving away from big iron hardware solutions to flexible software systems that run on off-the-shelf servers using standard operating systems. Microsoft has developed two enterprise-class conferencing and collaboration solutions, Microsoft Office Live Meeting service and the presence-enabled capabilities available in Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 Release 2.