5 steps to accelerated
ROI for collaboration
technology
New collaboration technologies promise to improve worker productivity, cut costs and streamline business processes. But because of the complexity of today’s heterogeneous IT environments and networks, companies are struggling to implement collaboration solutions on time and within budget. For example, recent research shows that between one-quarter and one-third of technology projects in corporate contact centers — where many of these emerging collaboration solutions are being deployed — are delayed by an average of seven months, resulting in total project costs that are 90 percent over budget.1
Successful collaboration deployments help boost worker productivity and morale and can improve customer satisfaction. But much depends on the deployment process itself. A case in point: Businesses applying best practices to project rollouts experience just one-fourth of the delays and additional costs of companies that don’t.2
In this white paper, Avaya describes opportunities and potential pitfalls associated with deployment of collaboration solutions. We also offer five key steps to facilitate implementation:
• Establish realistic goals and metrics • Create an encompassing integration plan
• Follow the integration and implementation plan precisely • Address the challenges of user adoption
• Assess the business impact
1 “The Hidden Cost of Technology Failure in the Contact Centre,” Customer Experience Foundation,
September 2009.
These leading practices can help your organization achieve greater flexibility and agility, and be better prepared to respond swiftly to fluctuations in the business environment. At the same time, this approach can help your business achieve a higher and faster return on investment (ROI) in collaboration initiatives.
Rewards — and risks — of collaboration solutions
In a business climate characterized by globalization, volatile markets and distributed workforces, collaboration is increasingly a critical element of competitive success. Although automation can streamline repeatable and predictable business processes, by 2015, 40 percent of many organizations’ work will be “non-routine,” up from 25 percent in 2010. This will require more communications — both internally between employees and externally with partners and customers — and what Gartner calls “hyperconnectedness” and “swarming” of knowledge workers to efficiently bring new products and services to market and solve any challenges that arise along the way.3
Additionally, an increasingly scattered and mobile workforce is driving enterprises to seek more efficient ways of communicating and collaborating. Ninety percent of employees already spend at least some time working off-site.4 The number of mobile employees is expected to reach 1.2 billion by 2013 — a figure that represents one-third of the world’s workforce.5
Many collaboration tools have emerged in recent years to help businesses cope with this changing landscape. These include shared work spaces, Web and videoconferencing, whiteboarding, instant messaging, and social media, such as Facebook, Twitter, wikis and virtual communities. Of course, the telephone and e-mail remain important parts of the business collaboration toolkit as well.
Enterprises are excited about the potential benefits of collaboration technologies. Recent research6 shows: • More than 80 percent of executives believe enterprisewide collaboration is key to success.
• Thirty percent feel that communications and collaboration tools have made it easier to work with others over the past five years.
• Seventy-five percent of companies plan to increase the use of communications and collaboration tools in the next 12 months.
3 “Watchlist: Continuing Changes in the Nature of Work, 2010-2020,” Gartner, August 2010, http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1416513. 4 “How We Work: Communications Trends of Business Professionals,” Plantronics, June 2010.
5 “Worldwide Mobile Worker Population 2009-2013 Forecast,” IDC, February 2010,
http://www.idc.com/research/viewdocsynopsis.jsp?containerId=221309§ionId=null&elementId=null&pageType=SYNOPSIS.
6 “Global Survey of Collaboration in the Enterprise,” Kelton Research on behalf of Avanade, February 2010.
By 2015, 40 percent of many organizations’ work will be “non-routine.”
This will require more communications — both internally between employees
and externally with partners and customers.
Businesses are aggressively deploying communications and collaboration tools in their customer service functions — typically, in the contact center — and within marketing departments. Most businesses already use e-mail and Web chat to interact with customers. Other collaboration tools, such as outbound alerts, home agents and screen sharing, are fast becoming mainstream.7 Additionally, nearly half of companies already use social media, such as Facebook, blogs and Twitter.
There is some evidence that deploying collaboration solutions results in a measurable ROI. For example, a study by the Corporate Executive Board found that putting collaboration systems in place can result in businesses saving 0.3 percent to 1.0 percent of their overall operating costs.8
However, some experts are uncertain about whether efforts to promote collaboration — especially using new social media tools — will deliver on all the promises being made. Gartner, despite naming collaboration as a top 10 initiative in 2010, estimates that more than 70 percent of social media initiatives will fail between 2010 and 2012 because of mismanaged implementations.9
This skepticism may be behind the hesitance of some enterprises to invest in new collaboration tools. Some are taking wait-and-see attitudes because of worries about how to integrate the tools with their existing systems or concerns that users will balk at using them. Indeed, social media such as wikis and social networking are not meeting planned adoption rates at two-thirds of organizations polled by the Corporate Executive Board.10 On average, these new collaboration technologies are taking between 15 and 32 months to implement after being introduced to an organization.11
Deploying with a laser focus
Anytime, but especially now given current market conditions, no business can afford unsuccessful IT projects. In our work with customers around the world, Avaya has identified five implementation practices that can help organizations focus on — and achieve — key objectives, including speedy ROI.
Step 1: Set goals and establish metrics for judging success. Before anything else, identify what you hope to achieve with collaboration tools. Do you want to improve first-call resolution of customer issues? Get a better handle on how your brand is perceived in the marketplace? Improve employee productivity?
Once you have established your goals, decide how to gauge whether or not the organization achieves them. In effect, you must make the business case for the collaboration investment. Depending on your objectives, you may include financial ROI metrics, such as revenue growth or top-line margin increases. You can choose operational measures, such as speed of resolution for customer service requests, or you can count product
7 “Companies ‘Unifying’ the Conversational Contact Center,” Empirix, October 2010.
8 “Getting Collaboration Right Pays: Small Efforts Can Improve Bottom-Line Performance by 0.3 to 1.0 Percent of Total Enterprise Costs,” Corporate
Executive Board, September 7, 2010, http://ir.executiveboard.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=113226&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=1467543&highlight=.
9 “Down To Business: Why Some People ‘Dread’ Collaboration,” InformationWeek, September 3, 2010,
http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/enterpriseapps/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227300062.
10 “Getting Collaboration Right Pays: Small Efforts Can Improve Bottom-Line Performance by 0.3 to 1.0 Percent
of Total Enterprise Costs,” Corporate Executive Board, September 7, 2010,
http://ir.executiveboard.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=113226&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=1467543&highlight=.
defects to track product quality. Some organizations use survey data that measure changes in customer satisfaction or employee morale.
Many organizations engage external parties to help them establish these goals and metrics. This can help you tap into the expertise of professionals with a variety of experience and skills. Also, an independent third party often provides more objective analysis of the business case for deploying the collaboration technology — one that isn’t colored by wishful thinking or unfounded assumptions about how the solution will help the organization.
Step 2: Create an integration plan that takes into account people and processes, as well as technology. Another key step is determining the best way — and place — to introduce the new collaboration technology into your organization. Sometimes this decision is easy. For example, the technology might be necessary to implement in a certain department because of a new customer or contract, or to respond to a competitive challenge. At other times, you may want to strategically choose an appropriate “entry point” for the technology based on where you believe you will receive the greatest benefit.
Whatever the case, you should first determine if your organization possesses an adequate infrastructure and network to support the new technology, and, if not, to upgrade the necessary elements so that a robust enough communications ecosystem is in place.
Pay attention to business processes and the impact the new system might have on them. For example, companies attempting to track customer perceptions by monitoring Facebook, Twitter and blogs need to put processes in place so that scattered teams located in customer service, sales, marketing and technical support departments can work together to review and act on any information that comes through these media channels. Also, consider existing systems. Is it possible to integrate the new collaboration technology seamlessly with existing applications and infrastructure components? Or will you need to circumvent systems because the collaboration tool won’t work on a particular platform or network?
Step 3: Follow the integration and implementation plan precisely. Successful deployment strategies allocate 80 percent of time and resources to planning, and 20 percent to actual implementation. And, as when deploying any complex technology solution, the number one priority is to ensure there are no surprises. This means that team members need to conform precisely to plans. If the system architecture design specifies 1,000 characters to capture and store Twitter “tweets,” a rogue developer should not be allowed to arbitrarily decide to change it to 140 characters to mirror Twitter’s own parameters. Communicating to team members the importance of following the architecture design is essential.
All systems need to be thoroughly tested before deployment. Companies that build rigorous testing into their project plans before deployment avoid delays and cost overruns. A Customer Experience Foundation
With current and emerging solutions that enable collaboration across disparate
communications channels, media, geographies and vendor platforms, organizations
that get implementation right the first time will enjoy a distinct competitive edge
over those that don’t.
study shows an inverse relationship between investments in systems testing and budget excesses.12 Although only 20 percent of survey respondents believed that inadequate testing caused their cost overruns, further analysis proved that everything from late delivery of supplies to system and network issues could be attributed to inadequate testing of systems.13
Step 4: Don’t underestimate the challenges of user adoption. User acceptance of your new collaboration solution is one of the key determinants of project success or failure. Users need to feel comfortable with the technology and confident of their ability to use it effectively. Providing adequate and appropriate training to users is therefore essential. However, many organizations focus on training IT personnel on how to customize, maintain and
troubleshoot the system rather than providing end users with sufficient insight into how it affects their roles and responsibilities. By designing training that shows users how the new tools enable them to work more efficiently and effectively, organizations can improve adoption rates and therefore business outcomes. Keep in mind that you are instituting a cultural change as well as a new technology. For example, if you have implemented a new videoconferencing system, you may need to impose new rules that forbid traveling for routine meetings. Starting with a small pilot, soliciting input from early adopters and communicating constantly with users before rolling out the system to the rest of the organization can help boost adoption by making users feel more intimately involved in the initiative.
Step 5: Assess the business impact and revisit Step 1. After your new collaboration system has been in place for a reasonable amount of time, use your established metrics to evaluate the system’s actual business impact and compare it to expected impacts. If you engaged an independent consulting organization to establish the initial metrics, it is advisable to use the same group to evaluate results and close the loop.
If the results are different from what you expected — either good or bad — analyze the reasons and take actionable steps to either remedy a failed assumption or achieve even higher ROI. It’s important to repeat this step as part of an ongoing cycle to ensure the system stays relevant as your business changes.
ROI means never having to say you’re sorry
In these times, businesses can ill afford to make poor investments or have major technology projects fail. With current and emerging solutions that enable collaboration across disparate communications channels, media, geographies and vendor platforms, organizations that get implementation right the first time will enjoy a distinct competitive edge over those that don’t — strategically, operationally and financially. Getting it right means identifying collaboration technologies that best align with your business objectives, operations and culture. It also means following best practices to achieve maximum returns on your efforts. The rewards for success are significant. You can more rapidly respond to business opportunities and challenges, improve worker productivity and morale, and boost customer satisfaction — all while achieving the ROI you envisioned.
12 “The Hidden Cost of Technology Failure in the Contact Centre,” Customer Experience Foundation, September 2009. 13 Ibid.
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