Written by: Dan O’Toole President
“A penny saved is a penny earned” so the saying goes. Ben Franklin expressed this thought many years ago and it continues to bear fruit today. Our organization has undertaken significant growth over the past ten years, both in product offering and geographically. As we continued to expand, we found overhead expenses growing, sometimes disproportionate to our sales. Something had to be done to reverse this trend.
A key cost centre in our company is telecommunications. Amongst other products and services, we depend on WebEx and GoToMeeting for both internal and customer communication on a daily basis. The cost of these services has been more than significant. A way to reduce these costs had to be found. Coincidently, we bought into video conferencing back in the 1990s as a means of managing travel and meeting costs. The technology works great but adoption had been a challenge, at least until now.
The opportunity afforded to us, improve adoption of key technology and reduce overhead expenses.
The introduction of a new player in the video conference world has led our company to a double win. Not only have we experienced significant improvement in internal/external adoption, we’ve totally replaced WebEx and GoToMeeting, savings of over $40k per annum. In April alone our teams engaged in 350+ meetings with over 930 participants, totalling 34,000 minutes of calling time. So what was the difference in adoption? The very same design feature that allowed Apple to capture a huge market with their iPad, ease of use.
By reducing the complexity of our organization and improving adoption, we’re more streamlined, cost efficient and maybe most important, more EFFECTIVE. Zoom is proving to be the fastest adopted collaboration technology for our teams at Phoenix Systems.
Reduce costs, improve efficiency; to coin another phrase, “You can have your cake and eat it too”.