So, how do you access the mobile minds within your organization, particularly when these are the employees who spend the most time with your clients and others in your target market?

You have a wealth of information dispersed across your mobile and remote workforce, and you need a way to harness it – anytime, anywhere. Instead of scheduling periodic (and usually too infrequent) returns to the home office, make this constituency an integral part of your company’s daily collaborative operations with Cisco Unified Communications.

With Cisco Unified Communications, you create an integrated and robust collaboration framework in which voice, data, applications and even video can be brought together in a single, cohesive environment. From mobile devices used at the gate while waiting for a flight to late nights in front of a laptop in the hotel’s club-level lounge, you can bring your employees into virtually any meeting or working session quickly and easily. They may not be in the office, but they’ll definitely be part of your team. Standing meetings and ad hoc sessions become richer as a result, by the inclusion of the perspectives closest to what’s happening out in the field.

The ideas, information and solutions that become available to your company through Cisco Unified Communications-based collaboration produce clear ROI, as speed, insight and experience can be accessed when you need it most. Product development, client relationships and team cohesion thus improve.

Bring your teams together with Cisco Unified Communications, and ever spot where you find one of your employees becomes an extension of your office. And, the many and varied experiences of your workforce are fused into a single and fully accessible database of business and market intelligence.

With Unified Communications, one of the benefits identified early in the selection and implementation planning cycle is cost containment, especially in regards to the travel budget. By using virtual meetings – in which audio, video, applications and data are integrated – companies understand that they can reduce their travel expenses significantly, translating directly to a meaningful cost savings enterprise-wide.

Of course, you can’t cut your costs without an investment, which leads to a balancing act. In addition to the cost of the Cisco Unified Communications technology, you’ll also sustain an increase in bandwidth expenses, a situation which Cisco says it experienced in migrating to a virtual meeting environment. But, the reduced travel expenses more than compensated for the bandwidth usage, resulting in a net savings for the company.

Cisco uses its own product, and it has seen results from it. The cost savings is direct, measurable and relevant. Take your meetings virtual, like Cisco, and you will drive enterprise-wide financial returns.

1. Collect data: use VeraSMART to collect call detail records off your Cisco voice system. Once you have all the data in one place, you’ve gained a platform for analysis and decision-making.

2. Do the math: use VeraSMART to calculate usage costs, and allocate them to individuals or cost centers. This will provide insights into where expenses – necessary and not – can be found and controlled.

3. Use the math: analyze call traffic and trunk usage, measure employee productivity, track client and project billing, manage inventory and monitor abuse. And, you can create a variety of reports to communicate your findings and help determine a course of action.

4. Plan and execute: turn your analysis into an action plan, line up your resources and pull the trigger. This is where you’ll see your telecom TCO drop and recapture more of your budget.

Behavior modification, of course, is the easy answer. Write up a policy about using directory assistance, and instruct your staff to use the web to find phone numbers – or their company address books. That’ll work, right?

Of course not.

When employees are rushed or taking on multiple tasks at the same time, they’re going to rush to the easiest solution. It’s not just human nature; it’s practical. So, you need to provide a viable alternative that results in a lower cost to your company. VeraSMART eCAS Call Accounting is exactly what you need.

Compatible with all major telecom switches, you can use this solution to integrate internal directory assistance capabilities into your existing telecom infrastructure. For businesses that are using Cisco UCM, CME or UC500 switches, VeraSMART is built to maximize the voice system’s full range of data gathering capabilities, providing more visibility into your users’ telecom activity and helping you make the decisions that can lead to a direct reduction of TCO.

Decisions require information, and smart decisions require reliable information. With VeraSMART, you can find cost-savings opportunities across your telecom infrastructure. With the resources you save, you’ll create an opportunity to invest in solutions that will move your company forward in the marketplace, making a prudent telecom decision an opportunity for a competitive advantage.

To help your employees work through a routine that can only be called “the new normal,” you need to implement technology that’s designed to align with this busy, always-connected lifestyle. With Cisco Unified Communications, you’ll make your network truly portable, accommodating those who need to be at least engaged (and likely productive) throughout the day – not to mention the employees who live and work out on the road.

Cisco Unified Communications delivers an integrated environment for mobile communications. Voice, multimedia and even mobile desktops help keep employees connected, informed and active wherever they are. With Cisco Unified Mobile Communicator, for example, your employees can gain access to your telecom infrastructure and even appear to clients that they are calling from the main office with features that make a call look like its coming from the office. And, remote worker expenses can be contained by routing calls through the corporate telephony infrastructure rather than the caller’s mobile service provider.

A distributed workforce can still like it’s based in one place. Whether you have employees who work from home, work from home before and after working at the office or spend their professional and personal lives on the road, you can present a united front to the marketplace with Cisco Unified Communications – while making your employees more productive than ever before.

Cisco Unified Communications is among this rare breed: your end-user community will thank you for it.

The reason Unified Communications has such a short path to adoption is because it delivers value almost immediately upon implementation, solving the problems that are most troublesome for end users. The flexibility available from voice through application sharing comes without disproportionate operational impact – translation: users get the upside with minimal impact to what they do every day.

Some adjustment is necessary, of course. End users will need to adapt to the new features that Unified Communications will bring to them. But, the learning curve is mild, we’ve seen, which makes it easier for the users to get on board quickly. Further, the ability to meet, share and collaborate on a moment’s notice takes the sting out of trying to book everything from flights to conference rooms in a climate where the budget for both is scarce.

Implement Cisco Unified Communications – your business users will thank you for it!

1. Long Explanations
Have you ever spent precious minutes in what is supposed to be a short conference call describing what’s on your screen … when you could be using that information to overcome a business challenge? The application sharing capabilities in Cisco Unified Communications make this sort of long-winded effort unnecessary. All participants in a meeting can look at the same thing at the same time.

2. Crammed Conference Room Schedules
With Cisco Unified Communications, you won’t have to put off meetings for a day (or longer) because there isn’t a conference room available. You can pull ad hoc meetings together quickly and easily … without having to jockey for space.

3. Technology Strain
Online collaboration technology has been around for a while – and for much of its history, users avoided it. These tools never seemed to deliver anything close to the same experience as meeting and working in person. That’s not the case any more: Cisco Unified Communications delivers a robust environment, and is particularly effective when implemented with a Cisco-powered network.

4. Disparate capabilities
Having to pull the pieces together and integrate them to the extent possible isn’t a sufficient solution. Cisco Unified Communications delivers an integrated suite of collaboration and communication tools, including voice, video, data and application sharing. Think of it as one-stop teamwork!

Cisco Unified Communications can help you recapture some employee mindshare when the world feels like it’s upside down.

The essential tension that exists during merger and post-merger integration activity is pretty straightforward. On the one hand, your employees have trouble focusing on their jobs as a result of the uncertainty that comes with a major merger or acquisition. Yet, you implement measures to recapture some of their focus, using operational efficiency to offset disruption. This is where Cisco Unified Communications can help.

With Cisco Unified Communications, you make it easier for employees to connect, collaborate and generate the ideas necessary to advance your company in the marketplace. The seamless integration of voice, video and data – not to mention full application sharing – facilitates both planned and ad hoc meetings, and gives employees access to experience and expertise in other business units and even different countries.

The speed and ease with which information can be communicated and shared via Cisco Unified Communications means that the time invested in progress drops substantially. So, when it is consumed by other factors, such as employee concern about the future, the effect on projects and operations in progress is not as severe.

In addition to gaining employee productivity back during merger, Cisco Unified Communications provides an ongoing competitive advantage, even during periods of relative calm. After all, the benefits of increased collaboration at a reduced cost (particularly since travel expenses won’t mount as quickly) don’t recede when business proceeds as usual. In fact, they may be magnified.

Implement Cisco Unified Communications to make your employee’s experience and expertise more available to your company as a whole, and you’ll find that during the disruption of a merger or acquisition, you’ll have better access to results. Work may slow down, but you can some control over the pace.

You’re looking to improve employee collaboration and communication. The reasons are obvious: reduce travel expenses, accelerate project progress and access more company knowledge and experience when dealing with a particular challenge. This type of request typically comes out of the business area, and you conduct the technological due diligence to ensure that a particular solution – such as Cisco Unified Communication – meets your company’s specific needs. But, you still have to get the CFO on board … even if you and the business owner are in complete agreement on every point.

So, how do you pierce the layer of skepticism that’s almost a job requirement for finance professionals? Make the cost savings and ROI opportunities clear up front. A solution like Cisco Unified Communications can improve company performance while actually lowering costs.

Travel expenses: The seamless communication experience afforded by the Cisco solution means that high-quality meetings can be conducted across borders and time zones, almost as if the entire team were gathered in the same conference room.

Resource access: Since ad hoc meetings are easier to pull together – regardless of where your employees are – it’s possible to access more of your organization’s institutional knowledge, resulting in more informed decisions and outsized results from sales through customer care.

The same page: With the ability to share applications and multimedia content in real time, it’s quite literally possible for team members or colleagues in different parts of the world to get on the same page quickly and easily, reducing the confusion or ambiguity that can enter remote collaborative efforts. This reduces costs due to error and scheduling and accelerates ROI.

Better over time: Following the implementation of a unified communications solution, employee performance only gets better over time. New hires will walk into a collaborate environment, and professional networks within the company will grow, meaning that the unified communications solution will give them ready access to a broader base of resources.

When you talk to the CFO about Unified Communications, don’t dwell on the technical aspects. Rather, emphasize that this communication and collaboration platform makes every employee in the company more valuable. Imagine the impact of having every idea in the company to every employee – that’s what unified communications brings to the table.

Cisco Unified Communication is optimized to run on a Cisco network. This shouldn’t come as a surprise. After all, both are from the same company, which means the expertise and resources in the organization have been brought to bear on the intersection of network and solution. While Unified Communications will run well on any network that meets the specifications provided by Cisco, using the networking solutions from the same manufacturer can unlock performance and results you might not be able to attain otherwise.

Further, there are the benefits inherent in using equipment form the leading network provider in the marketplace. Cisco has earned its place at the top, and the reliability and speed of its IP networks makes it a natural choice for Unified Communications or any other IT initiative.

The benefits of improved employee communication and collaboration are substantial, and the ROI case is clear. When you head down this road, it’s crucial that you have the proper networking infrastructure in place to support Unified Communications. It’s certainly worth exploring the advantages of using a Cisco network.

Click here to learn more about Cisco Unified Communications from MTM >>