Following are examples of how companies have used Microsoft’s® Unified Communications technologies to increase revenues, reduce costs and improve customer service.

Telecommunications Company

The Need: A global provider of telecommunications products and services realized that it needed to re-engineer its business processes involved in responding to customer service and provisioning issues. Managers noticed that whenever there were exceptions to the normal flow of processing customer requests, technicians needed to go to a different set of communication tools to resolve the issue. Usually the staff would call someone to get the information needed. Frequently, those calls would go to voice mail, adding delay to resolution time. But even when the call was successful, getting the information was accompanied by a lot of “social chit chat.”

The Solution: For Phase 1, the company implemented Unified Communications from Microsoft® to deliver enterprise chat and presence awareness as new communications concepts for their employees. The company embedded presence into its corporate employee directory to provide the ability to see whether and how someone is available. As a result, managers observed that IM functionality prompted the people using it to get right to the point, and also let them work on several issues simultaneously.

In Phase 2, the company added Unified Communications from Microsoft® to their existing provisioning and network inventory system. With UC integrated into the system’s user interface, which already showed workflow's and task ownership, technicians now have presence information and are able to get to the right person quickly to resolve exception items. Technicians no longer have to leave the provisioning application in order to deal with the exception.

Results have been dramatic. The new systems with Unified Communications from Microsoft® embedded have improved cycle times by 75%, reduced response time by 80%, and achieved dramatic headcount reductions. In Phase 3, the company plans to extend Unified Communications from Microsoft® directly to their customer base.

ADVERTISIING AGENCY

The Need: Without a central, integrated way to source media information and compile proposals, this advertising spends countless hours capturing data and managing updates made to client offers. Lack of collaboration cross-departmentally results in duplicated efforts and missed sales opportunities.

The Solution: Unified Communications, SharePoint® and Office now enable employees to source data from various systems, research content from a single view and find internal collaboration partners via presence and enterprise messaging. Clients gain access to research and draft documents. Higher quality client proposals are now produced more quickly with cross-departmental collaboration and connection between previously disparate systems.

IT CONSULTING FIRM

The Need: A fragmented marketing approach and an unstructured proposal generation process has led to difficulties coordinating people and resources to support new customer leads and business proposals and has resulted in lost sales opportunities for this global T consulting firm.

The Solution: Unified Communications, SharePoint® and Office support presence, enterprise messaging, workflow and document management to streamline the proposal generation and client deliverables. Collaboration amongst team members, including sales and staff, is drastically improved with presence, team workspaces and automated workflow's.

HEALTHCARE PROVIDER

The Need: The current system for gathering and managing patient data is complex and cumbersome, requires excessive manual content management and takes valuable time away from patients.

The Solution: Unified Communications, SharePoint® and Office streamline the patient data management system with presence, workflow'sand content management functionality while maintaining HIPAA compliance. Clinical teams track and manage patient cases more effectively. Simplified management of patient data gives nurses more time with patients.