Interesting SMB UC Pain Point Survey from Siemens

Siemens announced yesterday the publication of a new SMB Unified Communications (UC) study that has some very interesting information and guidance.  The announcement has already been covered by traditional media, so won't repeat that, but here are some thoughts about how to use this information.

The key information from my viewpoint is the list of the top five issues identified by SMBs as pain points.  These are very similar to the "communication hot spots" we have highlighted for the past several years in tutorials, webinars and sessions at VoiceCon and InterOp, and also similar to the findings for Blair Pleasant and Nancy Jamison in their UC Productivity study last year.   Just to review, Siemens' top five are:

1. Inefficient Coordination -- coordinating among team members in response to time-sensitive customer requests.
2. Waiting for Information -- causing a delay in work, task or project completion
3. Unwanted Communications -- pointing to low priority calls and voice mail that consumes time
4. Customer Compliants -- including compliants about the ability to reach the person
5. Barriers to Collaboration -- preventing progress in completing collaborative work

All of these sound familiar, and it's great to have more industry confirmation that the pain points exist.

Now comes the hard part - really solving the problems!  The press release suggests that solving these problems would save time worth $5,000 per employee per year, or $500,000 for a 100-employee company.  This will equate roughly to a 9% productivity gain in that company, with either a reduction of 9 positions or the ability to grow the company's revenues by 11% with no added headcount. 

This is possible, but to do this will definitely mean going into UC-Business Process improvements (UC-B) in our terms and as shown in the UC Resources section of our site.  ROI analyses show that only when the business processes are changed can a company get the big savings.  For example, by acutally changing how customers contact their sales people, using Siemens OpenScape, Shimano (the major bicycle parts company) actually did increase sales by 20% year-to-year with the same headcount.  More examples are mentioned on the site and at vendor case study sites.

So, thanks, Siemens, for the confirming study.  Now, please continue the work with more case studies, training, seminars and channel support so that everyone is clear on "how to" actually achieve the savings potential of UC.  Without that follow-through, this study will just look like marketing hype; with the follow through, the UC industry will boom and the recovery of the global economy's health will be accelerated!