Largest End-User Survey Quantifies Huge Costs, Workflow Disruptions and Frustrations Caused By Fragmented Communications

Landmark Study Reveals Status Quo Could Conservatively Cost 1,000-Person Enterprises Nearly $13 Million Yearly in Avoidable Expenses and Lost Productivity

The largest-ever survey of enterprise and contact center employees and their workflows reveals the silent but staggering true costs of fragmented communications: Enterprises of 1,000 persons could leak nearly $13 million a year in lost productivity and avoidable expenses. That’s just one of many startling results from a recent, landmark in-depth poll of 517 communications end-users across North America and Europe conducted by independent Insignia Research of Toronto, Canada and commissioned by Siemens Enterprise Communications.

The survey report entitled “Measuring the Pain: What Is Fragmented Communication Costing Your Enterprise?” is the first to fully quantify the costs of the status quo – including workflow disruptions, added costs and associated frustrations to enterprises lacking unified communications. It explored pain points at the individual, team and enterprise levels in terms of time and impact on serving customers as well as the frustration and anxiety to users and their teams. A solid majority of the respondents (62%) identified themselves as being in customer service and sales roles. The survey asked very specific questions about experiences with existing communication systems while involved in customer-facing and time-critical processes.

Highlights of the survey included:

• Ninety-four percent of respondents reported waiting an average of 5.3 hours per week on information from others to complete tasks. In 1,000-employee enterprises this can translate to more than $9 million yearly in lost productivity based on a $37 weighted hourly wage. Taking a process view of this nearly universal pain point, the negative impact of 5.3-hour delays in customer-facing activities has larger implications on customer sales, service and revenue realization.
• Respondents reported an average productivity loss of 7.8 hours a month at offsite locations because they lack the communication tools they have in their main office. Nearly a full day each month is lost because they are not properly equipped with effective, remotely-accessible collaborative communications systems. As workers continue to become increasingly mobile, the net effect of this can be dramatic. Fully weighted, the annual 1,000-person enterprise cost estimate exceeds $3 million.
• Enterprises are wasting at least $3,400 per person each year in unnecessary business travel expenses because of ineffective or non-existent collaboration with existing communications systems. Managers are forced to synchronize teams through expensive internal meetings requiring travel. In a 1,000-person enterprise, these costs can top $3.4 million a year.

“Never before has a study so clearly captured the extent of the frustration felt by individuals, managers and teams, and so completely quantified the extraneous costs leaking out of the enterprise as a result,” said Jim Burton, principal of UCStrategies.com, a leading market research firm specializing in unified communications across the enterprise. “Aside from the hard costs uncovered in the survey, there are soft but very real costs in terms of customer responsiveness and satisfaction.”

The solution, Burton said, is an enterprise-wide, unified communications platform like that reflected in the highly scalable Siemens Open Communications architecture. It is designed to unify enterprise communications, providing a rich user experience and fixed-mobile convenience anytime, anywhere.

According to Dr. Thomas Wiemers, Vice President Strategic Marketing at Siemens Enterprise Communications, Siemens commissioned the independent survey to help its enterprise customers and the market realize the enormous costs of continuing the communications status quo in their businesses:

“To get the most conservative view of the data, we asked the researchers to discount their soft-cost findings by 75 percent,” he said. “Even then the soft costs work out to more than $8,400 per employee each year; factoring in the hard dollars of travel and communication expenses, the data shows an annual impact per employee approaching $13,000 no matter what size the enterprise. With these findings, the potential return on an investment in unified communications becomes most compelling.”

For the white paper on the research findings, please go to: www.siemens.de/open/ucsurvey