A Cooperative Project of VoiceCon and UCStrategies.com, originally posted February 28, 2007
UC advocates, whether vendors selling systems or IT staff seeking project funding, need to clearly distinguish between the features, the advantages and the benefits of these new solutions. Too often, these distinctions are blurred.
Features are basic descriptions and are often listed on the product data sheet—“This car model has 4-wheel drive.” Advantages differentiate; they point out how one product is better than an alternative model or brand—“4-wheel drive means you can always get where you are going, even in deep snow.” Benefits are about impact; they translate the features and the advantages into tangible, and measurable, improved or optimized results—“4-wheel drive means you’ll make it in to work, even when it’s snowing hard, and you can earn $350 and get all the new leads that day.”
Seems simple, but features, advantages and benefits get mixed up all the time. Figuring out the benefits is especially tricky. For one thing, benefits tend to be specific to the prospective buyer. People living in L.A. aren’t impressed by the “snow-day” benefit from 4-wheel drive, neither are folks who don’t drive to work. And more important, advantages are frequently mistaken for benefits. “Always getting where I want to go” sounds like a benefit, but it’s actually an advantage. To become a benefit, we have to link it to a result that meets a goal or objective—earning income, or the value of more leads.
This is much more than an exercise in semantics. Telecom history is littered with products that never got off the ground. They had features and even advantages, but the customers weren’t shown identifiable and measurable benefits.
Unified messaging (UM) is a good example. It has plenty of features and many advantages over the previous alternatives. But suppliers have been unable to successfully articulate benefits in ways that cause the green eyeshade guys to smile. Vendors tout studies showing how knowledge workers or road warriors can save 17 minutes per day by having all their messages in one place. But that’s an advantage, not a benefit. What’s been missing is a believable story about how to aggregate those 17 minutes times 300 people into helping attain some corporate goal. Where UM has been successfully purchased, it been because of benefits such as lower cost of document management, increased revenue due to message delivery to sales reps’ Blackberry devices, or a TCO reduction.
There’s an important lesson here for UC, because the vendors are in real danger of falling into the same trap that has snagged unified messaging. The “anywhere, anytime, any media” mantra is frequently dragged out as a benefit. That’s not a benefit; that’s an advantage.
My colleagues and I at UCStrategies.com define UC as being “communications integrated to optimize business processes.” That definition links UC features and advantages to real, tangible benefits through process optimization. While it’s not the only path, it’s usually a short step from business process improvement to demonstrable ROI. We continue to refine our models and are capturing case studies that clearly show these business results in enterprise environments.
As UC concepts become more widespread, we will see many applications develop. Advantages will apply and benefits will accrue to individuals, to workgroups and departments, to the entire enterprise, and even to collections of companies within a supply chain. The most easily found UC advantages are often for individuals. But the most easily identified benefits are usually from business process improvements within workgroups or departments. We encourage user companies to look first at business processes to identify UC applications with solid ROI.
So, here’s my advice: Watch for the subtle distinctions between features, advantages, and benefits. For many people, “saving 17 minutes a day” or “right-clicking on the sender’s name to call them” sound like benefits, but they aren’t. They’re advantages that don’t directly translate into cost savings or revenue gains. What’s needed is to show how UC concepts, when built into business processes, reduce cycle time, cut human latency, or improve the customer experience and revenues.
If you’re a vendor, make sure your sales channels understand these distinctions, and learn how to identify the quantifiable benefits in your prospects’ operations. If you’re on an enterprise team that is proposing a UC project to the Finance Committee, think hard about how you translate the product features and advantages into tangible benefits that impact your company’s bottom line.
What do you think? Write to me at dvandoren@vanguard.net or post your comments here in the VoiceCon Unified Communications eWeekly forum. And see you next week at VoiceCon in Orlando!
Don Van Doren
Vanguard Communications and UCStrategies.com
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