The Aberdeen Group, widely known for publishing research focussing on the video communications industry, has released a new study 'What Happens When Everyone in the Office Has Video Conferencing?'. The study compares companies where all employees have access to some form of video communications against companies who lacked some access to video across the whole organisation. Over a six month period, Aberdeen surveyed 131 companies to analyse their video conferencing usage, how they deployed video and their perspectives on the value of video communications.
Companies Get Most from Pervasive Video Strategy
The results showed that companies with a pervasive video conferencing strategy (ie. where all employees have access to video), spend an average of $890,000 during the initial investment period to support an average of 13,000 employees; through a combination of PC-based video solutions and room-based video conferencing. On the other hand, companies that provided solutions to only part of their workforce spent an average of $910,000 to support 5,600 employees.
Therefore, the companies who provided video conferencing to ALL of their workforce spent 50% less per employee ($69 v $163) than the companies who only deployed visual communications for only some of their workforce.
Companies that adopted more video throughout their organisation saw the greatest performance improvements in the key departments of sales, marketing and customer service - all crucial to boosting revenue. As employees in these departments were given access to video, it became an increasingly important tool for engaging with new and current customers, specifically within the B2B environment. Since B2B sales are typically about demonstrating products and services, visual communications became an essential tool for those companies to provide a more personal approach to client sales, whilst reducing the amount of travel and associated cost of traditional meetings.
Recommendations for Companies Before Deploying Video Conferencing
Although these results focus on the companies who are already using video, Aberdeen provides the following recommendations to ensure that companies plan for successful adoption from the very beginning of their video strategy:
• Focus on a foundation that includes technical, operational, and ease of use concerns.
• Develop a roadmap for supporting remote workers with visual solutions.
• Implement an employee feedback scheme to help aid adoption and further deployment.
• Aim to achieve interoperability between room-based solutions and pc-based conferencing.
• Allign business improvement processes with visual technology to see where video could be used to address inefficiencies in certain departments.
• Integrate video conferencing into your unified communications and social platforms.
• Go Mobile by enabling video conferencing on smartphones and tablets. In this post-PC era, where bring your own device to work (BYOD) is a growing trend, those companies who plan for the future will see the greatest results.
The results from the survey undoubtedly show that companies who deploy visual solutions throughout the whole organisation gain the most from their investment. This usually doesn't happen instantly and can take a substantial amount of time to achieve but by supporting a deployment using the recommendations above, companies can ensure they don't pass up on any of the key benefits that can be gained from an investment in communications.
Ian Shutts - Digital Marketing and Online PR Solutions
730 Promo
CityIS assist organisations achieve true business transformation by improving operational efficiencies and realising competitive advantage through global video communication. The company delivers a unified communications platform - Video Conferencing, telepresence, audio visual integration, Video Communication - changing the way organisations communicate and interact.
No comments:
Post a Comment