In "How to Leave a Voicemail" the author, Joshua David Stein, makes humorous references to how many people don't follow the basics when leaving a voice mail. To me, the lesson is that even with familiar technology, when used incorrectly, can result in disastrous outcomes. Perhaps Bret and Tiger have learned this lesson.
If a technology as familiar as voice mail is taken for granted, "it's just voice mail", imagine what can happen with new technology, especially if it is introduced without adequately training new users (the sink or swim model). Sometimes training budgets are short changed because of unanticipated product acquisition costs. If users are not properly trained, there should be little surprise when user productivity drops sharply and the anticipated productivity gains fail to materialize.
The biggest hidden costs of voice mail replacement can be avoided if you can seamlessly migrate your users and not force them to change their behavior. We can upgrade your messaging system and give you a vast array of new features without disrupting your users and administrative staff. Other important questions to ask are what UC features do you need now? How much is it going to cost to deploy (taking into account user and administrative training)? and What is the most cost effective path to get there?
Organizations are being bombarded with the message (from vendors whose cash hoards are in the tens of billions of dollars) that they need to get on board and buy the infrastructure now to support UC or they will be left behind. A sub-set of the message is that since voice mail is part of Unified Communications (UC), if you fail to buy their latest products you will miss out on getting all of the wonderful benefits that UC delivers. The message boils down to taking a leap of faith in that vendor's vision of UC with them telling you to buy everything from them. The vendor dilemma is how to respond to shareholder expectations of growth that greatly exceeds the overall forecasted rate of tech spending. FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) are now as much a part of UC as Presence. In this economic environment almost no one is going to do a "rip and replace", typically an incremental approach is adopted. This has resulted in the Trojan Horse sales pitch from vendors trying to get their foot in the door. This says, "start with our messaging product, we have all of the features your users need." This begs the questions... Who decided that? and How are your users going to feel about losing their "unnecessary features?". Even these "foot in the door" voice mail systems can be quite complex to deploy because they require substantial planning, user training, complex integration and product customization.
- Cost reduction
- Revenue increase
- Reduction of human latency resulting in increased revenue or decreased costs
- Improve business processes resulting in increased productivity and efficiency
- Improve employee satisfaction