How unified communications delivers ROI for businesses

Why now for unified communications?

Even with the emergence of remote or hybrid working at scale and the Openreach ISDN switch off (scheduled for 2025), there are still many companies across the UK with legacy on-premises ISDN based telephony. So why are there still plenty of companies out there that haven’t yet embraced hosted telephony and unified communications?

For some, there’s the illusion of technical complexity, and for others there’s an assumption that more features and capability equals more cost. Let’s tackle that second ones as we discuss why moving to a hosted telephony solution with unified communications features not only saves money, but can actually deliver a return on investment back into the business.

Zero Capex

Moving to a hosted model enables you to implement a communications suite without attracting unwanted CapEx (capital expenditure) in the form of on-premises equipment that would need to be purchased or leased. When you host your PBX in the cloud the only hardware you need to consider is desk phones for users that want them, and headsets for those who would rather use a soft client on their laptop.

Even in these instances, you can often benefit from having some or all of the hardware cost built in to your monthly licence subscription costs with the vendor, which are considered OpEx (operational expenditure) that offers less of a financial burden than the upfront capital liability of PBX ownership. Deployments are also typically far swifter and simpler for the employee than the alternative. 

Cost to manage

One of the onerous costs of legacy or on-premise telephony is maintenance. With telephony being the lifeblood of how you interact with your customers and suppliers, you know you can’t do without it. On-premise telephony doesn’t offer the same levels of resilience as a hosted PBX, which makes having a maintenance contract with your vendor all the more critical.

These are often both costly and contractually lengthy. We would always advise performing a wide cost review when considering your telephony deployment – it’s easy to focus on the tariff and ignore those maintenance costs that could make a massive difference to your overall contractual cost.

Resilience

Even a non-technical buyer will understand the resilience benefits of hosting their PBX in the cloud rather than on-premise, but often this is viewed exclusively as a technical benefit rather than a cost one, which under calls the value of the resilience case.

Our advice is to think more about the impact of having a resilient phone system, versus not.

If your phone system isn’t resilient and you suffer an outage, how will that impact your ability to do business with customers and suppliers, and what could the cost of that be? It’s often unseen costs such as this which can be the most expensive.

Ease of communication

With a cloud PBX you can enjoy a wealth of technical capabilities, depending on your chosen vendor and solution. Customers who use our CallSwitch One platform enjoy voice, video calling and conferencing, instant messaging, document sharing, presence, and much more.

Not all unified communications solutions are born equal, but if you deploy a hosted solution you will enjoy a superior feature set than on-premise, and that attracts a hugely positive ROI.

People can get work done quicker and easier, and they can achieve this from anywhere (which is more important than ever right now). It means people can work more effectively, take quicker decisions, and as a result they’ll feel more productive and happier.

The case for compliance

For companies operating in financially regulated industries that need to adhere to compliance practices such as PCI and MiFID II, the cost of achieving compliance can be high - but the potential risk of failing to meet those standards could be far higher.

Legacy telephony introduces two cost headaches here. Firstly the cost to deploy and maintain on-premises recording technology is exceptionally high, especially when accounting for storage costs.

Secondly, on-premises solutions are not as flexible and technically powerful as their hosted counterparts in terms of the speed and accuracy with which information can be retrieved, analysed and reported on both internally or to a regulator.

The quicker you can get to the information you need, the cheaper it is to do so, both in terms of staff time (your compliance officer) and potential regulatory fines by not reporting breeches in a timely fashion.

Conclusion

For companies still utilising on-premises telephony, there has never been a better or more appropriate time to consider and embrace a hosted PBX solution that includes unified communications functionality. It empowers the workforce, adds resilience, ensures compliance, and reduces costs in terms of deployment and maintenance.

To learn more about how CallSwitch One can support you, contact us today.