Being knowledgeable on communications solutions is a competitive advantage for SMEs
A recent survey we conducted happens to confirm my last blog introduction statement “While Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) are affected by the recession, most of them keep investing in their business and on the top of their investment list is IT”.
In this challenging economical situation, SMEs can only afford to spend on business critical assets and for 75% of the small businesses surveyed, that includes their communications system. Unlike larger companies which had more resources and purchased extra capacity on communications system in preparation for future growth, small businesses were more cautious and kept a close eye on their actual needs when it came to investing in communications technologies.
As a result small businesses continue to incrementally invest in spite of the recession if the need exists. Our study shows that SMEs see value in communications to improve employee productivity and to increase employee satisfaction and retention allowing more flexible work schedule.
This survey confirmed a strong interest in telecommuting (when working from home) and mobility (when working on the road) solutions. However the high interest does not necessarily translate in actual deployments of these technologies. This is mainly due to two reasons.
First most SMEs do not know that these solutions are available to them today and that they can be easily deployed with a simple software upgrade of their existing communications system. They also do not necessarily have a good understanding of what these solutions can do for them. Documents such as “Unified Communications for Dummies” (SME Edition) can help and I will also look to address this in my next blog.
The second reason goes back to the fact that resource conscious SMEs need to see real tangible value prior to making any investment. To this end, ROI tools as well as the 60-day software trial Avaya offers can help prove out the value of a targeted investment.
When these two barriers are removed, SMEs are the first to adopt technologies like telecommuting and mobility and use them to their advantage like Broken Arrow, a customer T-shirt reseller, that improved their customer sales by 15 percent within a year by deploying Avaya’s telecommuter solution.
Though we will have to wait for our 2010 survey results to confirm this, I am confident that this trend will accelerate and I invite all my SME readers to share any similar experience on this blog.
Posted by Isabelle Guis at 16:33 on June 03, 2009