If your organization has not had a meeting with an agenda containing both “Recession” and “Improving bottom line” buzz words lately, please let me know, I want your stock.
However, for those companies who don’t have a fruit in their logo, the reality is that they need to keep their costs low and profits high to stay afloat during current turbulent times.
“If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it” — you probably have heard this phrase many times.
Here are few metrics that will help you calculate ROI for Cloud Collaboration Software:
Metric #1: Telecommute
Cloud Collaboration software allows team members to interact with each other in real time, without being in the same room, hence one of the most valuable benefits of deploying collaboration tools within your organization is an ability to support full-time or part-time telecommute for your staff. For example, in the current economic situation, if by using collaboration tools you can send some of your employees to work from home, would you be able to save on your rent and operational expenses?
Metric #2: Travel Costs
Another benefit that is simple to calculate — saving money on travel costs. Online conferencing can reduce the amount of business travel if your employees can work out contract details or do a presentation for a customer from their computer using a web-conferencing or real-time document sharing capabilities of collaboration software.
Metric #3: Response to Customer Requests
The average response time to your customer requests — is yet another metric you should see declining since all project-related information is stored in one place and is easily accessible by all team members.
Metric #4: Customer Satisfaction
When the response time goes down, customer satisfaction goes up, and you can measure it using a metric called the Net Promoter Score (NPS). Here is a great article describing NPS: http://goo.gl/Sp3iH3
Metric #5: Employee Satisfaction
Don’t forget about your team! Employee satisfaction looks like an intangible metric; however you can still measure some results by running regular anonymous surveys among your staff similar to NPS, asking how likely your employees are to recommend your company to their friends. Run the survey before implementing the collaboration software and 2-3 months afterwards.
If the collaboration tools will spare your people from working overtime and give them flexibility in terms of working hours and telecommute — you should notice a significant difference in the survey results.
Metric #6: Employee Retention
Employee retention is another metric you could use to measure collaboration software ROI. It’s directly linked to employee satisfaction and the savings of not having to re-train new hires can be quite substantial.
So, as you can see there are many ways to improve the bottom line and cut costs in your organization by having the right collaboration tools in place. Just don’t forget to measure ROI using some of the metrics mentioned above, so you know exactly how much money you saved for your company. You never know when you might need this data.
