Reduce Operational Costs

We all face pressure to cut costs – Siemens Enterprise Communications can help you do something about it. And now, while you’re cutting costs, we’ll help you reach your environmental initiatives as well.

Organizations ‘leak’ revenue all the time. Every time a call is missed, a colleague cannot be reached or a customer service agent has to return a customer’s call, it’s money wasted. But there are smarter ways of working – ways that improve productivity, collaboration and communication while helping you manage your costs and resources more effectively.

Open Communications is our unified communications strategy for bringing together your people, locations, networks and devices. It opens up new, cost-effective ways of communicating and collaborating virtually, so you can cut back on expensive day-to-day communication costs, like travelling to face-to-face meetings and improve your utilization of sales and service staff whenever possible.

In the process, Open Communications solutions can help you make better use of your existing infrastructure, assets and supplier relationships by identifying areas that are draining resources or where you could consolidate or outsource operations. Of course, we can also show you where you’re paying too much for networking or call costs and demonstrate how you could improve terms with service providers. And we know that lowering your energy consumption and related costs is important too. We’ll show you how our software-based solutions can reduce the energy needed to provide voice and unified communications services by up to 90% over hardware-intensive options. This reduces not only your carbon footprint, but also many of your operational expenses. We’ve done it ourselves and we’ll show you how.

Open Communications fully exploit fixed line and cellular technologies, as well as your existing IT infrastructure – not just to reduce costs, but also to grasp new business opportunities and promote more effective and flexible ways of working. The end result? A leaner, more efficient and manageable Open Communications environment, which gives you a competitive edge.


Increase the efficiency of sales teams and channel partners

Our Unified Communications solution, OpenScape UC Application, enables sales and service teams to see who is available at any time and initiate instant communication. And because our Open Communications solutions are available on site or via hosted service delivery, both your sales organization and your channel partner ecosystem can use the same presence-based application to collaborate in real-time across internal and external organizational boundaries. This way, communication does not become an obstacle to realizing new revenue and instead enhances collaboration amongst sales channels. It’s altogether a more efficient and successful way of working.


Reduce operational costs of travel, conferencing and relocation

Employees don’t have to work in the office to be most productive. OpenScape UC Application,  allows teams of workers to collaborate with customers and colleagues as effectively as if they were sat in the same building. Our solutions also have a direct impact on cutting operational costs. Take travel: by enabling audio, web and video conferencing across many time zones, the need for team travel to ‘synch up’ on projects is significantly reduced because the team is always highly synchronized with real-time collaboration and use of frequent virtual meetings. These solutions allow your employees to avoid commuting, reducing carbon emissions while keeping money in their pockets as well. One of our customers in Europe reduced overall petroleum consumption by five percent, moved half of their meetings to video confernecing, and reduced their travel expenses by 30%.


Improve the utilization of your most expensive resource: your people

People are your biggest cost, but they are also the source of your company’s knowledge, innovation and creativity. Why not use self-service solutions to resolve routine enquiries – typically one in four calls to your call center – so your agents can invest their time and energy in dealing with customers that have more complex queries instead? Another way to improve resource utilization is to use the skills-based routing engine in our OpenScape Contact Center solutions. It automatically allocates agents to answer calls based on the caller’s request, agent utilization and current service levels in the contact center. If you want to automate even more, we now offer you a robust voice portal solution to further concentrate your agents on the high-value, revenue-impacting calls instead of the mundane.

Thanks to its IT-based deployment model, your employees can use this technology to log in from home too, so you can gain the benefit of extra agents at short notice by equipping them with little more than a headset and a simple desktop application. During periods of lower inbound calls, agents can also be engaged automatically to execute callbacks, outbound campaigns and follow up calls – increasing resource utilization, service levels and revenue opportunities. Perhaps once you’ve tasted the operational benefits of the virtual contact center, you’ll want to explore the green benefits of this model too. Imagine the cost savings associated with less buildings, less real estate contracts, less energy used and many of your employees not commuting and emitting carbon into the environment. It’s being done around the world and we can show you how.


Maximize existing resources with an IT-based approach to communications

Our Voice services are virtualized and shared for best utilization and IT resources – even communication and collaboration - are dynamically allocated to services and users.  Like Web 2.0 technologies, IT-based communications aren’t defined by hard boundaries, but take an open approach towards integrated communications. That’s why we’ve based our Open Communications solutions on open and de facto standards, like SIP, and open architectures like SOA.  So you can improve operational efficiency by integrating communication and collaboration applications seamlessly and cost effectively into your existing IT environment, while removing human bottlenecks, overcoming the limitations of a rigid silo-based communications landscape and reducing the time taken to complete individual business processes by up to 30 per cent.

Drawing on an IT-based approach to communications through concepts such as on-demand computing with a hosted service can improve operational utilization and provide more flexibility for the agile business.  In the long run, IT Telephony solutions deliver improvements not only in operational efficiency but also in asset utilization, so it’s a win-win situation all round.  

Besides, do you want to pay the energy bills to power and cool dozens of PBXs or just two OpenScape Voice servers that can serve up to 100,000 users with software-based communications? Do you want phones that pull electricity from the wall all night in empty offices or OpenStage phones with a new, ultra power-efficient stand-by state that consumes 60% less energy versus our competitors’ devices? The latter choices are obviously the better ones, for both cost reduction and to reach the environmental initiatives of your company.


Simplify your infrastructure and costs with IT Telephony solutions

Using our Voice solutions you can reduce operational overheads associated with your current communications infrastructure, as well as networking and call costs. Some of the simple ways in which you can do this are by optimizing the company voice traffic on the WAN, identifying the most cost-effective breakout point into the PSTN (Public Services Telephone Network) and by exploiting the increasing competition resulting from the entry of SIP-based carriers to re-define the terms and conditions with your service provider. SIP-based communications can also provide a more cost-effective means of replacing PBX systems wherever possible, eliminating the need to “rip and replace”, reducing complexity and in turn further costs.


Reduce costs and leverage your assets

Do you know how much your communications are costing you today? Knowing exactly what you’re spending on communications is vital, if you are to find ways of reducing your operational costs. Through our OpenScale services portfolio we can help you understand where your company is spending too much, and make specific recommendations for service and technology efficiencies.  We can also help you cut costs in other ways; for example, ensuring that you’re making the most of low cost network connections and tariffs, where possible.

Service Management - including delivering communications via managed or outsourced services – enables you to, gain the additional benefit of predictable cost forecasting and asset planning. It will also make your assets work harder for you by analyzing application usage and performance. Either way, you will have a much better idea of how much your communications cost the organization – and, more importantly, how you can get the most out of them.


Reduce operational costs by up to 35%

We can reduce a customer’s direct operational costs by up to 35% and, better still, improve service levels at the same time. So essentially you get more for less. If it sounds too good to be true, consider how our OpenScale services work.  When we first assess your communications design, we’ll look to consolidate or cut back on over-capacity or poorly configured communication links, wherever possible. Even better, if you outsource the delivery of your communication environment to Siemens, you can free up capital expenditure and improve cashflow, which you can invest elsewhere in growing the business.

We have years of experience in managing communications networks across many different types of organizations, so we’re in a good position to spot any weak points in your communications set-up. Bear in mind, you’ll also get the benefit of our expertise in improving your networks too, whether through application availability or speed of access. So as well as cutting costs, you can keep your users happy too.