Unified messaging
Unified messaging can drive customer responsiveness, employee productivity and competitive advantage. It supports revenue growth and market leadership by supporting expanded message and contact management capabilities. A unified messaging solution can save significant amounts of productive time per day, per employee and enhance customer responsiveness which can lead to increased business and greater competitiveness. For example, it takes time to retrieve, and respond to, email, fax and SMS messages from the separate communications applications. |
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Unified messaging is a unified communications solution that consolidates all of theses mail messages in one location which means that they can be managed more efficiently and effectively. This speeds up the response to customers and improves employee productivity.
The benefits of unified messaging
Look at the benefits of unified messaging:
- Send faxes at the click of a button instead of having to print out every fax, carry it to the fax machine, wait for your turn, and possibly wait for it to retry when the number is busy
- Store fax/SMS numbers centrally in one phonebook
- Send faxes that are more legible and of better quality
- Automatically route incoming faxes to the right recipient
- Track fax activity and archive faxes
- Make sure that only you can view your outgoing and incoming faxes
- Send faxes, SMS or Telex in the same way as you send email
- Only look in one mailbox for messages
- Automatically retry fax numbers if they are busy
- Easily send fax/SMS to groups of people
- Add desktop SMS
- Schedule messages to be sent during cheaper off-peak times
- Fax or SMS from any SMTP product
The ICON advantage
ICON are the leading experts in the UK on unified messaging and integrated FAX, SMS and Telex technologies
Some solution providers try to make their unified messaging product fit a customer need - a bit like trying to get the proverbial round peg in the square hole!
At ICON we are different - we takes a consultative role in the way unified messaging solutions are offered and provided, that is why we have become expert in two solutions;
- MESSAGEmanager from MESSAGEmanager Solutions
- Faxination from Fenestrae.
Both product families offer excellent benefits and cost savings as well being best of breed unified messaging communication platforms.
The business case or payback time
The deployment of a unified communications fax solution is easy to cost justify.
A European study concluded that sending an electronic fax saved, on average 7 minutes of an employee's time per fax. Thus the biggest cost saving achieved with a unified communications fax solution is the employee time saved in sending a fax message. Another large cost associated with manual fax machines is the cost of consumables.
The ROI calculation for FAX unified messaging
The UK average national salary for full-time workers in April 2004 was £21,944, or £10.41/hr according to the Office of National Statistics. Thus, on average, the sending of an electronic fax saves £1.21 per transmission. The productivity gains using an integrated fax solution is shown in the following table.
No of faxes per week |
100 |
200 | 500 | 1000 | 2000 |
Weekly productivity Saving |
£121 |
£242 | £605 | £1,210 | £2,420 |
A 15m fax roll will cost approximately £2.50. A 15M roll will create up to 50 pages of fax ( probably less when transmission reports are considered). An average fax is 3 pages (1 x header & 2 x text/image). Thus a £2.50 fax roll will support 16.5 faxes. This gives the cost of paper at 0.15p per fax received.
If a business receives 200 faxes per day (1000 per week) they will save £150 per week on fax paper.
The total benefit to a company of deploying a unified messaging fax solution for a business which sends and receives 1000 faxes a week is shown in the table below.
| Per week | Per Year | |
Saving on consumables |
£150 |
£7,800 |
Productivity gains |
£1,210 |
£62,920 |
| Total benefit to business | £1,360 | £70,720 |
Can you afford not to invest in a unified messaging solution?
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