Unified communications as-a-service (UCaaS) has been adopted more and more widely over the last few years as organisations look to empower their users with improved communications. However, even though enterprises are deploying the technology, enablement and adoption remains a challenge. A recent report by analyst firm IDC uncovered that in spite of businesses’ best intentions to deploy UCaaS, only 38% of users in an enterprise with UCaaS utilise the deployed capabilities.
For UCaaS companies, it has therefore become necessary to be more than simply providers of technology and to become supporters of their customers’ initiatives to encourage UC adoption. “For us, it’s not just about providing a set of technologies,” confirmed Rob Scudiere, President and Chief Operating Officer of Fuze. “It’s embedded in our culture that you have to make sure people can make the best use of their technology and support customers in their change management strategies. As a technology provider, its incumbent on us and other UCaaS providers to raise the level of our game in this respect.”
Increased usage of UCaaS is the measure of success for initiatives to grow utilisation of systems, but UCaaS vendors are no longer applying effort in a retrospective way. “Success starts upfront in the sales process by helping customers understand what their current state is and where they are in the general software-as-a-service adoption curve,” added Scudiere. “The Fuze Success and Support Plans are geared towards this and provide a pragmatic approach to achieving customers’ goals.”
The Fuze Success Plans are a collection of services, resources, and best practices for adoption, support and success that the company has brought together to help organisations educate and overcome some employees’ reluctance to embrace UCaaS. The services and resources available in these plans fuel continued growth, not only during and directly following an initial implementation, but throughout the entire relationship with Fuze.
Fuze provides three different plans to help businesses achieve their goals and meet their technical needs. The Core Fuze Success Plan is included with a standard Fuze subscription, and has essential resources and tools to achieve adoption goals. Enhanced and Premier Fuze Success Plans are also available to accelerate time to value and to help organisations achieve business outcomes with dedicated resources, tailored programmes and advanced tooling.
“We take the full customer lifecycle approach to this and help customers understand where they are and what they need to do,” explained Scudiere.
“We have tailored packages to provide the specific support organisations need in a pragmatic and ongoing way.”
An important focus is on enabling customers’ IT teams with greater visibility into their organisation’s usage. “We provide self-service capabilities for IT administrators so they have visibility into their usage and they can see what ratings users have for the products. They can take these metrics and use them in quarterly business reviews with us in which we have a business conversation about how the product is used, what they’re spending, how they can optimise that spend and how their peers use the system.”
For Scudiere, this is vital to how Fuze builds loyalty. “When you can enable IT people to have a business-level conversation, it puts them in a different seat at the table and they can lift up their own position in that discussion,” he added. “We formally launched our Fuze Success Plans back in May 2020, and in the first 90 days we have had multiple sales. So it’s clear that what we’ve built is of interest to existing and new customers and prospects ,and we look forward to helping increase utilisation, optimisation and business value with our new Success Plans.”
