Have you ever looked into how much unified communications and collaboration (UC&C) downtime is really costing your business?
UC&C downtime is when your unified communications channels – think your websites, phones, emails, video conferencing, instant chat, collaboration tools – are not up and running.
When these channels are down all work comes to a halt, your customers can no longer contact you and your team is restricted to face-to-face communication. This is clearly not an ideal scenario for a workforce operating in this century.
The cost of downtime cannot be downplayed
It's not unusual then for Operations teams to pride themselves on uptime levels of 99.9% or even 99.999%.
But before breaking out the champagne, ask yourself – what about that last remaining 0.1% of downtime? By focusing on uptime the cost of downtime can sometimes be downplayed.
What's the value of the 0.1%?
What if the 0.1% affected happen to be in the 20% most valuable customers – worse still the top 5%?
Employee downtime
Before we get carried away let’s take a look at the numbers in a typical scenario: Let’s say an organization has 10,000 employees and 4,500 of those are affected by downtime each year.
At 99.9% uptime that equates to 525.6 minutes. If the average knowledge worker salary is $70,000 then the annual cost of downtime per employee is $301.
Could be worse right?
If you multiply it by 4,500, the number of employees affected, the sum jumps to $1,352,894... a year. Not such a small number anymore. Remember this figure doesn't take into consideration if they were the top 20 or 5% – but you can see how it could quickly snowball out of control.
Watch our webinar – No time for downtime: Fixing network packet loss
Contact Center downtime
Consider another example of something more concrete, like productivity in a contact center, where their business is communication: If the average sale per call reaching a contact center was valued at $230 and you get 4,000 calls per day, at 99.9% uptime in a 10 hour-a-day contact center, you'd be missing out on 219 minutes per year.
If the contact center gets 6.7 calls per minute you would lose 1,467 calls in a year, amounting to a hefty sum of $337,479. That's before considering potential knock-on effects such as losing repeat business or reputational damage.
Soft dollar costs
What adds insult to injury is some CFO's discount these losses as ‘soft-dollar’ costs, because they don’t show up on the balance sheet.
Dismissing 1.35 million, or 1.73 million if contact center folk were affected, is concerning.
The problem is that there shouldn't be a 99%. It should be 100% all the time.
Systems shouldn't fall over and fail, your customers should always be able to talk to you. Solving problems before they even exist should be the focus.
To find out more about how much downtime is costing your organization and how you can halve your communications operational costs watch our webinar No time for downtime: fixing network packet loss.
