What Clients WantWhat Clients Want

As a communications consultant, I've noticed some trends in the buying habits of my clients as relates to voice system replacement, cloud versus on-prem, and UC functionality desired.

Unlike the Mel Gibson movie, "What Women Want," where Mel's character could read women's minds, most communications consultants aren't as lucky. We have to engage in discovery by discussing requirements with clients. In my consulting practice, I have many mid-market and large clients that have engaged me to assist with replacing their voice infrastructure. The majority of times, this means existing 10-20 year old PBX(s) that will be forklifted out, a scenario that has been played out thousands of times. But when determining what the replacement solution will be, it comes down to figuring out what the client wants.

So, what do my clients want? I was surprised to learn that from a functionality standpoint, clients typically want a limited set of abilities above what they have now. In my experience, there are the "must-have" items:

Then there are also some items that many of my clients see as "nice-to-have" functionality, including:

What's missing from these lists? Unified Communications!

During the discovery process of an engagement, I describe workflow scenarios where traditional UC often has value. The vast majority of my clients can't see value that IM and presence provide. Elements that are often considered to be part of UC, such as conferencing and mobility, are included above, but what about messaging-centric workstream applications such as Cisco Spark or Slack? Tools like these are based on a synchronous messaging model that allows logical groupings, coupled with asynchronous file store (i.e. Box, Dropbox, SharePoint) to replace email.

Aside from smaller groups within a line of business and some interesting work in higher education for faculty/student interaction, my clients are not yet clamoring for these type of solutions. It should be noted, that many of these workstream application vendors have expanded their offerings to be platforms (CPaaS) that include voice and the ability to easily integrate voice within an application.

Some consulting engagements that I am hired for are labeled as "Unified Communications" consults, however, they are really voice projects that are masquerading as UC.

Beyond the core functionality to procure new voice services, what other things do I discuss with my clients? One big item is on-premises versus cloud solutions. Although the vendor community has declared victory for the cloud, in reality, the move to cloud procurement been as pervasive as you might believe in the mid-to-large market space. Why do my clients in this space prefer on-premises? Top reasons given include cost, control, and capital expense.

In regard to cost, the TCO for premises-based is still better than cloud in many instances. The only recent exception to this, in my experience, has been one client with several hundred locations with extensive local and long distance costs. The cloud-based voice services include sufficient bundled minutes to reduce the calling expense to zero, in that case. The issue around control spans many areas such as security, upgrades, support, and integration.

I do have some clients that prefer a cloud solution, and aside from the example mentioned above, these tend to be in the SMB space. The reason these sized businesses tend to prefer cloud is because many have small IT departments, often outsourcing many functions to a managed service provider, and are especially challenged to operate and support systems themselves.

The things that these clients have identified as important have remained consistent for at least the past two years. Of course, there are exceptions to these patterns and unique client requirements will lead to different solutions.

One of the other elements of the consultant/client discussion is a review of risk. The risk that I'm asked about most often is the longevity of the vendors and solutions being considered. Questions such as:

Each vendor has a different risk profile. Whether it is the vendors pushing their clients into the cloud (where premises-based solutions may get poor support), or the continued complexity of network-based solutions to the M&A activity in the industry, risk abounds. Doing one's homework and vetting vendors and their solutions remains the best way to mitigate risk.

In a nutshell, for the most part my clients are looking to replace their voice systems with newer voice systems with added functionality. Cloud is in the mix for some. Messaging-based apps are of interest, but for IM/presence, not so much.

"SCTC Perspectives" is written by members of the Society of Communications Technology Consultants, an international organization of independent information and communications technology professionals serving clients in all business sectors and government worldwide.