Mitel instant messaging and unified communications tools make it easier for you and your employees to remain in touch throughout the day. In an article posted on the Grossman Group, they estimated “that small and mid-sized companies lose an average of $5,246 per year, per employee, to ineffective communications.

For example, if you’re a company of 100—that’s $500,000 in lost productivity in just a year’s time.”

Unified communications and collaboration (UCC) tools, instant messaging and other products from Mitel can save your company time and money, compared to email and phone systems alone, because it is easier to maintain reliable lines of communication with coworkers and clients alike.

Why Mitel UCC Tools?

The first question most business owners ask is, "why should I invest in more communication tools?" The answer to this is simple; it pays for itself. Consider an office without instant messaging and other UCC tools…

When you need to speak to a coworker, you most often have no reliable way of knowing if they're available. Even worse, you spend time playing the game of phone tag that never progresses beyond an exchange of voicemails.

Investing in Mitel unified communications and collaboration systems can remove these obstacles. Rather than walking down the hall and hoping your coworker is in his/her office, you can check the presence tool to see if they're available. If that individual isn't, you can tag them in the system so you receive an alert when their status changes to "available."

Internal and external voice communication can be made easier using UCC to transfer from one phone to another, ensuring that people can reach you whether you're at your desk or out of the office.

Calculating the Return on Investment

The bottom line will always drive investment decisions, so if you're going to invest in Mitel instant messaging and UCC tools, you want to know how to determine the ROI involved in doing so.

Here are some simple instructions for calculating the ROI of your investment in Mitel UCC:

	1. Start with the total number of users that would operate Mitel instant messaging, presence and other assorted UCC tools.
	2. Calculate the average loaded hourly cost per full-time employee, which looks like this:
	3. Next, estimate the daily time savings per employee using Mitel presence and UC (in minutes). An ultra-conservative estimate is 5 minutes, but most are greater. In the same Grossman Group article cited above, the study found that, “Communication coordination alone was found to consume an average of 3.7 hours per week.”
	4. Calculate the estimated total company wide weekly time savings with UCC, in minutes. This calculation should be daily time savings x number of users x 5 days/week.
	5. Calculate the estimated total company wide annual time savings with UCC, in hours. This calculation should be your total from step 4 (company wide weekly time savings) x 50 weeks/60 minutes per hour.
	6. The final step is to calculate the annual dollar savings as the loaded hourly full-time employee cost x estimated total company wide annual time savings with UC (in hours).

Calculation in Action

Marco recently ran this ROI calculation for a local bank looking at using Mitel instant messaging and UCC tools. The company had a total of 250 users on its UCC platform, with an average loaded hourly cost per full-time employee of $23. The conservative estimate of 5 minutes of savings was used (per employee, per day).

With a company wide weekly time savings of 6,250 minutes per week, or the equivalent of 434 hours per month, the total monthly savings in labor costs for the bank was $9,982.64. Given a monthly investment of $7,500, the bank was still saving $2,482.64 each month, courtesy of Mitel unified communications and collaboration tools.

If you'd like to implement more effective communication and save money for your organization, schedule an appointment with one of our specialists. Through an in-depth consultation, they can assist you in estimating the time and cost savings potential for your business, and provide an initial estimate for the cost of a Mitel solution built specifically for your organization.