Unified Communications Case Study: How New Unified Communications Deployment Raises Productivity for Cisco Sales

Unified Communications Case Study: How New Unified Communications Deployment Raises Productivity for Cisco Sales

Early deployment of Unified Communications gives Cisco employees more time for customers, plus greater flexibility and collaboration.

Challenge

Cisco equips its employees with the best communications and collaboration tools available to help them succeed in their work. However, today’s globalized marketplace and emerging technology trends are changing the nature of business communications and the demands on employees worldwide. These changes include:

• Heightened emphasis on workplace productivity

• Greater need for workplace collaboration, often occurring spontaneously

• Use of communications tools to replace travel

• Higher customer expectations for responsiveness

• More flexible work schedules to be productive outside “regular” office hours

Cisco has more than 90,000 employees and contractors working together at 300 sites worldwide. These workers have 90,000 IP phones, 45,000 software IP phones, 40,000 mobile phones, and 70,000 voicemail boxes. Employees use instant messaging; desktop video and Cisco TelePresence; Cisco Unified MeetingPlace; WebEx and WebEx Connect; and third-party web tools such as wikis; as well as file-share servers and email to collaborate and share information.

What all of these sophisticated communications tools, and the employees who use them, could benefit from is more integration to allow users to move efficiently from one tool to the next, or use several tools at once with minimal effort. They could also benefit from a capability known as presence, which gives users awareness of each other’s availability, for instance, whether a coworker is currently on another call or available to join a conference. Along with presence, increased integration of unified communications tools and other collaborative applications could help Cisco employees address new workplace challenges, leading to significant productivity gains.

"I find that my phone rings less and I have fewer voicemail messages, even less email, because I handle most issues in a single call." - Randy Sorensen, Regional Sales Manager, Enterprise Voice, Cisco

A recent Cisco IT survey revealed the following:

• The average Cisco employee spends approximately 15 minutes per day “playing phone tag” with customers and business colleagues.

• The same employee spends 13 minutes per day calling multiple devices to locate an individual.

• After employees have reached each other, they spend an average of 12 minutes setting up meetings and conference calls each day.

Solution

To help address these challenges, Cisco IT partnered with Cisco sales and the Cisco Voice Technology Group to lay the foundation for the NEW. The plan’s goals include:

• Provide early unified communications support to members of the Cisco ecosystem who do the most communicating; that is, sales people, to enable them to collaborate effectively with the most sophisticated unified communications tools, anytime, anywhere, and on any device.

• Furnish sales teams with unified communications products so that they can experience the business benefits first-hand, and share that experience with customers.

• Determine the best way to use the network as the platform to transform the way that users communicate and collaborate.

• Act as an early reference and experienced advocate for Cisco Unified Communications within Cisco.

Network-Enhanced Workspace

An early deployment of services within the Cisco production network, NEW provides a reference point for sales, improves solution quality through internal feedback to the business units, and accelerates internal solution deployments through early exposure to support and training issues. The initial focus of NEW in 2008 is the deployment of unified communications solutions, taking advantage of the strong partnership between IT and the Cisco Voice Technology Group (VTG). The IT project team began general deployment in November 2007, deploying the NEW capabilities to more than 3500 sales people worldwide over four months.

Cisco IT’s plan is to closely follow the VTG’s deployments of unified communications services and apply them globally for the Cisco sales force, giving the field an opportunity to “use what they sell and sell what they use.” According to Ahmed El-Gabalawy, NEW program manager, NEW serves as a link between the company’s alpha and production environments, allowing users to fully incorporate the unified communications experience into their daily work lives. “We walk the line of trying to get the latest technology out to the users, while factoring in the stability of the network and being careful not to throw users into an environment that’s set up to fail,” says Kelly McCoy, lead IT engineer in Cisco’s Alpha Solutions Group. “Our work with NEW has definitely benefited the VTG Business Unit and other groups at Cisco to find different issues or enhancements to the system that might not have been identified in an alpha or lab environment.”

A recent survey of NEW users indicates that these tools are already transforming the way that Cisco employees, and particularly the sales force, do business. The more than 800 responses show that early exposure and use of the Cisco Unified Communications solutions that are available through NEW are ultimately helping employees to unify their workspaces (regardless of operating system, location, application, or device) to save time and increase productivity.

Results

The results of the NEW deployment in all areas have been positive, and Cisco IT is on track to deliver these tools across the enterprise. User feedback in the Cisco IT survey illustrates how unified communications can immediately translate into business productivity. Within the first three months of usage, 80 percent of the survey respondents had overwhelmingly positive comments about the NEW capabilities (“I can see a real benefit here”), and 22 percent said their overall personal productivity increased (“It has made my daily work experience much better or more efficient”).

Based on these limited and early survey results on productivity improvements, projections for unified communications deployment to the entire Cisco field show an estimated annual benefit of more than 1 million hours within the Cisco sales force. (The projection for annual impact assumes that only 50 percent of operational efficiencies are converted to productive use.) In monetary terms, this projected productivity impact translates to an annual benefit of US$63 million to US$80 million. (Results projected to 15,000 sales people were based on responses of 792 full-survey participants.)

The results of the NEW early field trial were so positive that Cisco IT has already successfully deployed the presence and Cisco Unified Personal Communicator capabilities in the company’s production network, and as of September 2008, mobility-related solutions will be deployed in production shortly.

“Unified Communications makes my borderless office and borderless home a reality,” says Randy Sorensen, a regional sales manager for Enterprise Voice. “Getting all your calls the first time, and resolving issues with the first call, eliminates telephone tag, which is a productivity killer. I find that my phone rings less, and I have fewer voicemails, even less email, because I handle most issues in a single call. Customers don’t have to call back; they can reach me right away.” Download the case study

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