Two minutes to understand: How to optimise investment in your communications system

It goes without saying that managing costs is a priority for businesses, but it’s become even more important given the various crises we are currently experiencing. With the hike in energy and raw material prices, finance departments are now even more vigilant when monitoring expenditure, so as to ensure that they are maintaining their profit margins. However, when it comes to communications, assessing cost is not always straightforward. Oftentimes, it’s more profitable to invest in a modern solution that has the potential to create value.

In this two-minute video, Ross Reeves, UK Marketing Director at RingCentral, gives advice on how to optimise the investment you make in your communications system and maximise its ROI:

Four ways to optimise costs thanks to the cloud

A cloud-based unified communications system (or UCaaS, Unified Communications as a Service) provides you with a single solution for managing all channels: phones, messaging, video meetings, fax, and sometimes even webinars.

Adopting a single, integrated solution draws on several different levers to reduce costs:

• By reducing the number of providers and, by extension, the number of invoices to process, you gain a better overview of your costs, allowing you to streamline your expenditure.
• By using a single system with a more intuitive interface, you reduce the amount of training that employees need and also the time that your technical support teams spend helping them.
• By outsourcing to the cloud, solution administrators no longer have to worry about the infrastructure, maintenance and upgrading of expensive on-premises hardware. Equipment and resources are pooled by your provider, generating direct savings in terms of both investment and operating costs.
• Finally, cloud solutions can also be fully controlled and managed remotely using an online interface. This allows you to save on both time and travel and can even lessen the size of IT teams, reducing your communications and associated management costs too.

The cloud helps secure substantial savings. By migrating their existing on-premises PBX to our RingCentral MVP cloud solution, our customers make savings of between 20 and 35% on their telecommunications costs and observe a reduction of between 10 and 20% in their overall IT expenses. This results in a 55% increase in return on investment and an average payback period of nine months.

Expanding features help maximise your investment

In order to maximise the potential of a given solution, it’s also important to take into consideration how it will evolve. With SaaS, you can expect regular updates comprising new features designed to enhance the user experience and address the latest customer needs, without having to invest large amounts in upgrades.

When choosing your provider, find out about how the company announces new features and how often these are released. Then, make sure to follow up on this regularly so you can make the most of your solution’s evolving capabilities.

In addition, don’t forget to look at what analytical and reporting features your system offers. By analysing the activity on your business communications system, you can monitor expenses and user performance more easily, making it possible to optimise costs and turnover.

A final point that can help you maximise your ROI: integrating your contact centre with your enterprise collaboration system. With a single platform, you can simplify administration and facilitate collaboration between all company employees. That’s what RingCentral offers, with immediate ROI benefits: a recent research shows that customers using one platform can often experience up to a 211% return on investment.

Find all the episodes in our “How to optimise your business communications” series here!

Why not also check out the RingCentral MVP unified communications solution?