“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players,” William Shakespeare told us, and that’s a useful way to view the migration to enterprise fixed-mobile convergence; think of it as a three-act play, and if done right, it’s a performance with a happy ending for all your company’s players.
Our FMC solution blends the best of mobile phones with the best of the corporate network. Mobile users work more efficiently, with the company benefiting through cost savings and increased control over mobile usage.
Act I: A company sets the stage for its FMC migration by gathering the data to show that FMC is a good fit. Ask yourself which employees would benefit the most and quantify that. Obviously, the more mobile an employee is, the more he or she will benefit from FMC.
Extending your enterprise PBX calling features to the mobile phone, with a single voice mailbox, and making all the minutes of use on-net, are productivity enhancers and cost savers for employees who are on the move most or all of the time.
Field sales employees, traveling executives, telecommuters and remote workers, and managers who roam throughout the company premises and are rarely at their desks are prime beneficiaries of FMC. How often do people stay at their desk, waiting for that important phone-call, or how often are they late for a meeting at another location, while finishing an important phone call at their desk? FMC can fix these inefficiencies.
Beyond these “road warriors”, there are a number of reasons why 100% of your corporate liable wireless population should be wirelessly integrated. Foremost is your company’s ability to enforce a single corporate policy across all phones in the enterprise (both wireless and deskphones) as well as the ability to unify cost accounting across wireless and wireline into a single call detail database can dramatically simplify your business and lower administrative costs.
Act II: Prove your business case with a formal ROI. Calculate how many minutes or hours a month an employee could save by never missing calls or by having to check only one voice mailbox instead of two. Would that be a modest 10 minutes a day? That’s still more than three hours of saved time a month; measure that against the typical $10 a month cost of an FMC solution.
Then look at the savings from making all mobile-to-enterprise calls on-net and by placing mobile international calls using the corporate trunks. Look too at the savings from the single administration and enforcement of corporate telephony policies. Calculate the increased revenue from a salesperson being able to answer their deskphone from 1,000 miles away. Sounds like it’s worth a lot more than $10 a month, doesn’t it?
Act III: The rollout. We recommend you start rolling out any technology to a cross-functional group of tech-savvy users, people all across the company who seem to always be open to a better way of doing things. These early adopters will become effective advocates and mentors to the laggards, who would still prefer the pink “While You Were Out” messages to voicemail. Over the course of several weeks, the early adopters will help carry your message as to why and how FMC will benefit your company.
The beauty of an FMC rollout is that it can be as phased as your company needs it to be. It’s not like the old telephone system cutovers, where everyone had one phone on Friday afternoon and arrived to a new system on Monday morning. The employees in the trial can just keep using FMC as they have been for the previous month or so, and new employees can be added on an ongoing basis.
That Shakespeare quote at the beginning of this post, by the way, was from the play “As You Like It,” which is more than appropriate for a discussion of FMC. Mobile phone usage at your company, thanks to the control, cost savings, and increased productivity of Mobile Integration, will be just … as you like it.
