Struggling to calculate UC management ROI?
Unified Communications (UC) platforms have become the backbone of modern business operations – aligning conversations, people, and data in the world of hybrid work. Just look at the latest market reports – currently, experts predict that the market will grow at a CAGR of 17.4% until 2030.
UC isn’t going anywhere, but companies are still struggling to manage their ecosystems effectively. Countless organizations are juggling endless software subscriptions, vendors, and disconnected dashboards at once – and it’s causing real problems.
Poor UC service management isn’t just a headache for IT teams. It’s an issue that has a direct impact on employee engagement, revenue, and productivity.
If your teams can’t communicate effectively, everything crumbles, and simply “reacting” to issues as they happen isn’t enough. Companies need to get one step ahead. Here’s what you really need to know about the impact of effective UC management on business performance.
UC Management ROI: The Hidden Costs of Poor Service Management
A fragmented approach to UC management drains budget, productivity, and resources. If you’re unsure about UC management ROI, just look at everything you miss out on without a comprehensive way to maintain visibility and control over your systems. You lack
- Tools to streamline time-consuming (and expensive) onboarding and offboarding tasks.
- A way to cut down on repetitive tasks for IT administrators (so you spend more on labor).
- Insights into the licenses and resources your teams actually use.
- Reliable solutions for managing assets, from endpoints, to software systems.
- Ways to proactively address issues before they affect your team.
That last point is critical. If you’re not proactively identifying and addressing problems, you’re exposing yourself to more unexpected downtime. Since Gartner suggests the average cost of network downtime is about $5,600 per minute – every second matters.
Here’s a closer look at the three most significant side-effects of poor UC performance.
Lost Productivity = Lost Revenue
Communication and productivity go hand-in-hand. If your teams can’t connect (particularly in the hybrid world), they can’t complete tasks, innovate, and problem solve. A single outage in your UC platform that prevents teams from communicating could mean that sales teams can’t work together on converting a lead, or marketing teams fall behind on trends.
Even customer service teams could end up leaving customers on hold – struggling to access the subject matter experts needed to address issues. The result is expensive downtime across every sector of the business. UC management ROI issues compound when IT teams don’t have a central environment for tracking, troubleshooting, and fixing problems.
They can waste hours fixing an issue that would have taken seconds to address with an intelligent system, the right insights, and even AI self-healing tools. They may not even see an issue emerging until it’s already had a major impact on team productivity and engagement.
Employee Frustration and Burnout
One of the reasons UC platforms are so crucial today is that they bridge the gaps between disconnected workers – office-based, remote, and field-based teams. Employees now use their UC platforms as their digital workplace – and if they can’t access reliable tools, everything grinds to a halt. This doesn’t just lead to serious dips in productivity.
When employees are constantly grappling with interruptions and outages, frustration mounts. Studies have shown that 51% of employees think bad communication increases their stress levels – leading to burnout and disengagement. When problems persist, eventually, staff members abandon ship, leaving companies to deal with the costs and disruptions of regular turnover.
Even if employees do stick around, they end up spending more time trying to fix problems or simply accessing the tools they need than they do completing crucial tasks. Staff start focusing on “catching up” – and the business falls behind.
Higher Operational Costs
Beyond the immediate consequences of downtime and employee dissatisfaction, another major drain on UC management ROI is inefficient budget management. Without UC service management tools that align various software solutions, vendors, and licenses into one trackable system, teams often lose insight into which services their employees use.
That means they spend more on unnecessary licenses and products they don’t need. According to Nermertes’ research, companies that use dedicated UC management solutions spend an average of $933 per endpoint per year in operational costs - compared to $1,303 for those using only the standard tools provided by their UC platform vendor.
That doesn’t even account for the costs of duplicate licenses or unnecessary software. On top of that, the manual processes involved in “reactive management” – such as traditional troubleshooting, drain IT resources and budgets even further.
