Highlights:
- Moving communications to the cloud offers many advantages, with cost reduction being top of mind for businesses.
- Leaders might have questions on how unified communications can save them money, and what those numbers look like.
- Check out our ROI Calculator
ROI Calculator
Our 3-minute questionnaire tells you exactly how much you can save with unified communications
Try it out
to see your potential cost savings.
Of the countless tasks, interactions, processes, and workflows that happen on the job every day, everything starts from effective communication. The phone call that closes a deal. The video meeting that kicks off a project. You get the idea.
But while effective communication is at the heart of any successful team, it ultimately exists to achieve one particular goal: profitability. This means supporting the organization’s communications needs while also containing—or better yet, reducing—costs.
Moving to unified communications in the cloud is one way companies can reduce costs—especially as more teams shift to remote and hybrid work on a permanent basis. After all, there’s no costly infrastructure or massive upfront investments to deal with—among other advantages.
But that doesn’t eliminate concerns over the total cost of ownership. When it comes to cost, businesses want to know:
- How much money does switching to cloud communications actually save?
- Where do the savings come from?
- What gains and efficiencies drive additional ROI?
Good news. We have the numbers.
Our new ROI Calculator
ROI Calculator
Our 3-minute questionnaire tells you exactly how much you can save with unified communications
Try it out
breaks down all of the ways your company saves by moving from on-premises to the cloud. Hint: It’s in the millions.
Here’s a rundown:
1. No on-premises hardware
From the onsite PBX to phones for every desk, on-premises systems usually require a large upfront investment. Also, on-premises systems need on-site storage space, specialized IT staff, and come with repair and maintenance costs that add up over time.
Unified communications eliminates this cost. For example, RingCentral is compatible with your existing desk phones and smartphones so there’s no need to buy new equipment. And the fact that you don’t need specialized IT staff to support the system frees up people hours so your technology experts can focus on other things.
2. Increased employee productivity
People hours are one of the most expensive resources a company can squander—and that’s exactly what happens when communications tools aren’t up to the job. To get the job done efficiently and effectively, employees need their communications tools to work.
When those tools are physically tied to the office, it limits how much workers can get done remotely; and when solutions don’t work, or don’t all work together, it also hinders productivity.
Unified, cloud-based communications unleashes higher productivity because employees can access messaging, video meetings, and phone from anywhere, and on any device. With a UCaaS solution, workers can communicate—and get more done—from any location.
3. Less downtime
On-premises hardware puts you at the mercy of your machinery. That’s fine when everything is working as expected—but it can be costly when a hardware issue or localized event such as a power failure or weather takes you offline. In such cases, the time required to repair the problem could result in an outage that lasts hours or days, with prolonged business disruption.
But when you’re working in the cloud, reliability is in the hands of your provider—and working with the right solution can help to assure that vital tools are always online.
A trusted cloud communications provider employs multiple layers of failover that prevent downtime events. For example, one of the tactics we have in place to guarantee reliability at RingCentral is maintaining geographically redundant data centers.
This means that if an issue occurs at one of our sites, we instantly and automatically reroute to another data center, with no impact on service. This is just one of the ways we are able to offer a 99.999% SLA—the gold standard for reliability.
4. Better employee retention
As remote and hybrid work frees companies to hire the best talent from anywhere—and gives good workers greater choice in employers—employee satisfaction has never been more important. Workers want jobs that are fulfilling with managers and companies that support them to do their best work. And this includes giving them the right tools.
Unified communications deliver a high degree of mobility. They make it easy to work from anywhere while eliminating frustrations like having to use multiple apps or reduced access to resources and information away from the office. Whether it’s taking a call from home or participating in a video meeting from the airport, unified communications makes working from anywhere simple.
There are cost savings that stem from delivering effortless communications. Happy employees mean less turnover. This in turn shrinks the costs associated with replacing and retraining vital workers.
5. Scalable: Only pay for what you need
Another way on-premises systems can bloat your budget? Because capacity is fixed, companies usually must provision for their full user load, regardless of their actual needs at a given time. For example, if you have a high number of seasonal workers or a hybrid workforce, you still need to provision (and pay) for all possible users, even when they’re not using the system.
Unified communications, on the other hand, is flexible and scalable. Rather than deciding at the outset how much you need, you can scale up or down on an as-needed basis. Better yet, provisioning is all managed through a single, self-serve admin portal, so any changes are simple to implement.
Delivering real ROI—for companies of all shapes and sizes
At the end of the day, these are just general ideas. Every company has its own unique business needs and savings will vary across the board.
Want to see numbers personalized for your company? We built the ROI Calculator
ROI Calculator
Our 3-minute questionnaire tells you exactly how much you can save with unified communications
Try it out
just for that.
Take a three-minute questionnaire to generate an estimated cost savings report that outlines just how much money your company can save by switching to RingCentral. Go ahead, try it out.
Originally published Jul 29, 2021, updated Jan 18, 2023