Apr 22, 2020 Quantifying the Benefits of Team Collaboration and Meeting Apps
As remote work drives rapid adoption of team collaboration and meeting applications, IT and business leaders are faced with trying to ensure that they are delivering measurable business value for their investment. Simply analyzing utilization isn’t sufficient to determine success. IT leaders must gain insight into whether or not, and how, these applications are providing cost savings, increasing revenue, and/or enabling gains in productivity.
About 30% of our research participants typically approach their collaboration investments in this fashion. We expect this number to increase as challenging economic conditions will mean that IT leaders will be under increasing pressure to justify spend. Fortunately, team collaboration and meeting apps are showing positive ROI for those who have implemented them.
For example, those using team collaboration apps like Avaya IX Spaces, Cisco Webex Teams, Microsoft Teams, Slack, Unify Circuit, Symphony, or the team collaboration capabilities in UCaaS offerings from vendors including 8×8, Mitel, RingCentral, Vonage, and more, report the following:
- 23.8% are reducing the need for meetings by an average of 30%
- 39.2% have measured an average of 24% improvements in productivity
- 34.3% have reduced IT spend by an average of $161k a year via elimination of redundant apps and shifting to cloud-based services
- 23.2% have delivered an average revenue gain of $368k by improving sales team collaboration
In addition, 25.4% have reduced email volume, by an average of 20.5%.
On the meeting side, those using integrated video conferencing, audio conferencing, and screen sharing apps such as Cisco Webex Meetings, 8×8 Video Meetings, Google Meet, GoToMeeting, Highfive, Microsoft Teams Meetings, RingCentral Video, Zoom and many more report:
- 26.1% are shortening meetings by an average of 27%
- 31% have measured productivity gains, by an average of 25.3%
- 24.3% have reduced IT spend, typically by eliminating stand-alone audio-conferencing services, by an average of $142k per year
- 20.7% have seen revenue gains averaging $268k by improving close rates and speeding product development and delivery
The bottom line is that team collaboration and meeting applications can deliver measurable return on investment. IT and business leaders should take the time to measure before and after scenarios for internal collaboration, customer and partner collaboration, and the ability to better support remote workers.
Join me on Tuesday, April 28 at 11 AM EDT for the second webinar in our Cost-Benefit Analysis series entitled “Real-World Benefits of Meeting and Team Collaboration Applications” where we’ll dig further into the data