Getting the Real Value out of CommunicationsGetting the Real Value out of Communications

The real payoff for integrating communications with other business processes comes at the top line.

Marty Parker and his colleagues at UCStrategies, among other people, have been saying for several years now that the real payoff for integrating communications with other business processes comes at the top line; sure, cost savings are great and everyone's going to continue to want them, even as the economy picks up. But make just a small improvement in your ability to generate revenue, and you could be looking at big bucks. And last week, I got to hear from someone who did just that.We did a webinar last week with Interactive Intelligence, and if you didn't get a chance to join it live, I really recommend viewing and listening to the replay, which you can access here. In the webinar, Geoff Calhoun, the IT director at AccuQuote, an online insurance-quote company, described how they started integrating business processes with communications via a pretty simple step: Using ACD routing-type functionality to assign work to agents automatically and electronically, instead of manually receiving faxes and distributing the work.

Geoff estimates that this change will lower the cost of materials to process an application by 40%. But the big payoff, Geoff said, is the 10% increase they're projecting in sales as agents' time is freed up from these mechanical tasks and they can process more customers. That's pretty much the classic scenario that UCStrategies talks about when they describe business cases for UC/CEBP (communications-enabled business processes). Geoff Calhoun estimates the project will have about a two-month ROI.

What's more, deploying this initial application appears to be having the desired and predicted effect of whetting the appetite of other departments within the company. "We're really getting a lot of excitement out on the floor," Geoff Calhoun said. People are saying, "I want to automate this next."

All in all, this appears to have been a pretty successful rollout. How do we know? Because the deployment was scheduled to go from the trial stage, in which about 2% of quote applications taken through the Interactive Intelligence system, to full deployment--100%--last Thursday, the day after our webinar. And Geoff Calhoun had time to spend an hour on our session. He seemed pretty relaxed, too.The real payoff for integrating communications with other business processes comes at the top line.