Auralink's Blog

Cut Office Rent in Half with Auralink

auralink — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 16:14:56 +0000

One of our clients in the legal industry recently had an “a-ha” moment. The company’s office space lease was coming due at the end of the year, and they had grown to the point where the current space did not provide room for the imminent continued growth. Given that the address was perfect for the company in that is was right in the middle of the local legal district, contributing to the recent growth via the networking potential of the location, the executives really did not want to move to a new location. The initial decision was to move all back-office functions off-site to a second location, but it was known that this would pose problems of its own. Executives felt this the best decision given the parameters, so the client came to us to talk about leveraging Auralink to help alleviate this problem.

The team assigned to evaluate the move and subsequent division of the company’s workforce began to see the Auralink service as a tool that enabled a great amount of flexibility, enough to solve more than the problem at hand, and broadened their horizons. Functions encompassing parts of Para-Legal, IT, Administrative, Sales and Marketing and Finance were all evaluated as to the pros and cons of ‘off-siting’.

In the end the executives enacted on the recommendation made by the team. Through the deployment of creative solutions, such as office space hotelling, and the company-wide deployment of Auralink, the company placed back-office personnel, as well as a sizable fraction of the front-office, at their own home offices. The company was not only able to stave off growing pains, but kept their affluent address and gained some valuable room-to-grow.

Of course, the cost of the second site was a significant amount, but the recovery of the costs of reimbursables like commuting and parking reimbursements and direct costs, as well as the elimination of environmental effects such as those incurred by things like snow storms and power outages along commuter railways, were added bonuses.

The Auralink Team loves a challenge like the one posed here. Your organization may not benefit to the degree this client did, but the effect and the savings are no less real at a smaller scale.

Get Two Hours Back in Your Day

auralink — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 19:46:11 +0000

Just about everybody in your organization will save time every day using our business-class videoconferencing tool, Auralink. The biggest gains you’ll see in getting back productive time, however, will be in the sales department. Let’s take a look , for example, at Carlo. He’s really good at setting appointments to meet with new clients. He averages between two and three appointments a day. Carlo starts out early most every day, fighting rush hour traffic, hoping to arrive on time at his first appointment of the day. After an hour long meeting, he gets back on the road to drive across town to his second appointment. Although the perspective client he will meet represents a great opportunity, the appointment is pretty far away, and there is some major construction along the way. Long story short, Carlo arrives, just a few minutes late. His blood pressure is through the roof, but the meeting goes well.

Early afternoon and Carlo buckles up after pulling out of the drive-thru to get back on the highway. About ten minutes after passing the exit for his office on his way to appointment number three, one with an existing client, his contact there calls to cancel, so Carlo turns around and goes back to the office to man the phones. With just an hour and a half left in the day, Carlo is able to reschedule that third appointment, but he really didn’t get as much scheduled for next week as he had hoped.

In this example, Carlo clearly spent some quality windshield time. Today, luckily, there wasn’t too much traffic, which made it tolerable, but also less productive as Carlo has been known to work the phone if traffic absolutely gridlocks his route.

Although the nature of drumming up new clients may always be laden with the obligatory drive time, Carlo also acts in an Account Manager for his existing client base. Today he only lost a little bit of time to cancellation, but if Carlo had used video conferencing, he would have spent less quality windshield time today.

Tomorrow Carlo is scheduled to meet with several of his long standing clients. The first meeting is about 45 miles away, and the second is about half that – in the other direction. Both are in the midst of rather good sized deployments of equipment purchased through Carlo and his company and both require some hand-holding. Carlo’s presence has still been requested as a warm and fuzzy for the client, even though he and the engineering team has process-ized installations like these; after all, the last two installations were performed more quickly and without a hitch.

Clearly, Carlo could make more effective use of his time as a salesman, and in fact has been known to continue to make and answer calls while stuck in an empty conference on the client site during installations like these.

When we showed Auralink to Carlo, he understood immediately what business class desktop video conferencing could do to his day. Using a state-of-the-art communications tool that works over a regular wi-fi connection, Carlo can retain his high-touch level of service from his office. Carlo plans on using Auralink to communicate with his clients more often, with a whole lot less wear and tear on his car seats.

Video Conferencing Essentials – Understand The Business Drivers

auralink — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 22:38:28 +0000

ROI, H.323, H.320, IP, ISDN, SIP, Codec, blah, blah, blah. Over the years organizations been inundated with acronyms and geek speak that quite frankly, has done more injustice than good to the potential video conferencing user base. I’ll never forget my first video conferencing experience with a fortune 1000 company back in the early 1990′s. The executives of this organization outlined a goal to cut travel costs between four national offices. The project was then assigned to a local IT director in the Baltimore/Washington area who initiated due diligence with all of the video conferencing industry’s major manufacturers. A technical scope of work was developed which outlined all the technical specifications of the proposed system. System capabilities included 30 FPS video, full duplex audio, 384 kbps ISDN, 36″ CRT (remeber those things!!), etc. After the IT Director spent a few weeks reviewing pertinent information, the company I worked for at the time was selected to help with the system integration. The total cost was about $100,000 per location for a rather large “portable (not so much) system”. After the project installation was completed, we setup training with the IT staff to run through the ‘system operation’. This included basics such as how to power up the system, place a call, adjust camera, push a scan-converted computer image to a far end site, troubleshoot technical issues, etc. I remember trying to reserve some time with the executives, but was told that training would be accomplished internally by the IT department. When we finished the IT folks had a thorough understanding of the system capabilities and functionality, so I considered our project a raving success.

About 2 months later, I received a call from one of the Executive Assistants to see if I could make some time to visit the site and review the system with the team. I agreed and expected to be showered with thanks for all the money and time the organization had saved from their ‘technology investment’. To my amazement, I was greeted by an unhappy executive that felt he had been sold an unsubstatiated ROI and inappropriate bill of goods. Upon further review, I found that the system functioned as intended, but usage was very low. I asked why the executive team did not use the system more often and found that it was essentially used as a picture telephone and offered no real tangible value from a basic telephone call. What’s the lesson here? In addition to identifying the technical needs of the organization, it is imperative that the solutions provider help the client understand the key applications that help drive adoption and eventually migration. The technology will evenutally fall in place, but only after an action plan has been developed to help leverage the ‘technology’ as a productive tool.