My UCStrategies colleagues have agreed on a definition for UC “Communications Integrated to Optimize Business Processes” that appears to be consistent with and being adopted my many of the industry’s players – both providers and users.  Also, UCStrategies has been out front in addressing the business improvement goals of UC in terms of ROI and, even more fully, to propose two sides to UC benefits: UC-U – for individual user productivity benefits -- such as the time savings from being able to reach some expert able to answer a question without exchanging voice mails and/or emails but using presence and IM for immediate contact; and UC-B – for business productivity benefits from some significant process improvement – such as reducing the time to market for a new product by weeks or months by eliminating delays caused by “human middleware”.  And several other industry players have adopted similar models addressing processes and business roles (e.g., Road Warrior, Corridor Warrior, etc.). 

While these definitional “protocols” are helpful and useful in moving the dialog forward and enabling many businesses to begin to adopt some UC capabilities with a greater belief that the investments are being well spent.  But, something still seems to be missing, for me. 

Many are acknowledging that there are two types of benefits from UC that drive ROI – UC-U and UC-B. (Several documents on the UCStrategies site describes these so I won’t be duplicative here. See www.ucstrategies.com/UC_and_End_User_Productivity_Study.aspx ). The UC-U – user benefits are likely to be soft and, therefore, may be difficult for a provider to sell to or for an enterprise to buy from.  On the other side, UC-B – business benefits are to be found by studying a company’s business processes, finding the communications bottlenecks (often centered in individual departments like the traveling sales force or the factory deployed customer service engineer) and finding enormous benefits from these departments by deploying a UC solution.  While UC-B may, indeed, find significant benefits for a subset of the user population, I’m not sure that these benefits, even if large per capita, for 5-10% of the workforce, will justify a broad deployment across the enterprise.  And without a broad deployment, what vendor or channel partner will invest the time to do a rigorous and potentially extensive pre-sales, likely non-paid study to find these benefits, if the resulting deployment won’t be company-wide? Or, is this the purview of engagement /end-user consultants to identify the opportunity areas/benefits as a key portion of their engagements with their clients?  And this might be the subject of exploration in another future article, by me or another UCStrategies contributor.

Perhaps the “missing link” in this discussion of where is the “UC beef” is Industry Vertical knowledge and specialization?  Two things happen when one approaches a customer/prospect equipped with in-depth knowledge of their business, its operations and key processes. 

First, it becomes much easier to gain constructive audiences with Business Decision Makers.  For example, which of these call transcript excerpts is more likely to get the initial meeting with the Owner of a network of 20 auto dealerships: “Hello, I’d like to come in and speak with you about how Unified Communications can help you make more money.” – or – “Hello, I have a solution that will improve the profitability of your service department by reducing missed service appointments.”  Which meeting would you take?

Second, good sales of an Industry Vertical solution are less likely to be competitive or commoditized by your competition.  Why?  Well, only the industry knowledgeable supplier gets the appointment with the decision maker, in the first place, and knows the “critical issues” and can translate the solution into value for the client (such as $200 average revenue for a service appointment with 5% of all appointments missed – totaling several hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost revenue annually).  And since there are no competitors, pricing doesn’t need to be squeezed.

I believe that is the value-add of vertical/industry solutions.  I am also beginning to see some UC providers begin to utilize vertical/industry specialization as a significant portion of their “Kit bags” as UC continues to mature and evolve.  And I certainly expect to see more – it’s obvious to me that industry knowledge has sold successfully before and will again, in UC. 

Oh, and by the way, the solution to the automobile service appointment problem is very simple – link the service appointment calendar with a contact script to contact the service customer to confirm the appointment a day or so before.  The confirming contact can be made by any mode, as the customer chooses (voice, email or IM, etc).  And the confirming contact can be made automatically, without the need of a full-time appointments clerk, by the UC solution acquired to support all of the dealerships’ service departments, and if a live response is required, an available customer service rep (presence identified) can be connected along with a screen-pop of the appointment information record.  And how many other types of businesses are service appointment driven?  So, while some industry/vertical solutions may be very complex and difficult to find, learn and quantify, many are almost obvious just from observing and researching a business.