Last week when Blair Pleasant and I had finished our UC end user benefits study we did a webinar on the findings that was sponsored by Genesys and CMP. Out of that we had a number of follow up questions from the audience, including quite a few from our colleague Art Rosenberg, who posted a review of the study on UC Strategies.com.
Art, who has a passion for unified messaging, asked why there wasn’t a focus on unified messaging as part of UC in the report. That is a good question. A simple answer would be that “well, we didn’t ask any questions targeted directly at UM”. But its more than that, nobody really brought it up either. Oddly, I had the same thought about fax (which can be standalone, or part of UM, which by default makes it a part of UC) this morning when I was talking to Dan Aronson at Sagem-Interstar, a provider of boardless IP-fax, about the fax industry. Users didn’t talk specifically about fax. Nor did we single out fax to ask a particular question about.
The survey was quite long to begin with, so we did our best to encompass everything, and as such, many of the questions were open ended to elicit user’s views on the benefits of UC, which is one of the reasons UM and fax weren’t specifically mentioned. On the other hand, we spent thirty minutes to an hour with each user, getting a pretty good picture of which features they use and why, which were of the most benefit to them, which had helped them save time and why, and how had UC changed the way that they work. So you would think that UM and fax would be specifically talked about, if users felt they were game changing, but they weren’t. In retrospect, I suppose we should have thought to call them out, but our own familiarity with UM and fax probably also got in our way as we clamored to hear the effects of UC as a whole.
This leads Blair and me to an interesting set of questions we’d like to go back and ask our respondents, as well as do some more research on those people that are implementing UC on an end user level. A few questions that come to mind, but we certainly haven’t fleshed out, are:
• Are UM and fax so ubiquitous that people don’t think about them as part of UC because they aren’t new and therefore play in the background?
• How are new users being trained on UC, and how are UC features being presented? Are UM and fax being talked about during training?
• Every UC user that we contacted talked about voice messaging and IM because they are broadly used, but many other features, such as click to call were new to them. Yet they clearly understood these new features to be part of UC. Do they feel that UM and fax also are?
Blair and I will both be gone next week, but the week after, the questioning begins anew, so if you have any questions along these lines, send them on over.