Only a few years ago, quality collaboration technology was thought of as nice to have, but not essential. In the new world of hybrid work, however, it can make the difference in whether organizations meet their most important business goals. Unlike with backend infrastructure, employees, and sometimes customers, interact directly with enterprise collaboration platforms, underscoring how important it is for organizations to get these investments right. With the right tools and services, companies can improve the way employees serve customers, help teams move faster, lower the management burden on IT staff and even reduce overall costs.

IMPROVED CUSTOMER SATISFACTION: Effective employees create happier customers. Armed with modern collaboration tools, workers can forge stronger customer relationships and provide better and faster service. For employees in sales roles, video collaboration can provide more face-to-face touchpoints between account representatives and their customers — not only strengthening relationships but also offering more opportunities to learn about customer pain points and cross-sell or upsell. And for workers in customer service roles, modern collaboration technology can help solve customer problems more quickly and loop in supervisors when needed. Collaboration tools also form the backbone of omnichannel customer service centers, giving customers the ability to communicate with companies over their preferred channel.

ENHANCED PRODUCTIVITY AND EFFICIENCY: Just as customers may want to escalate a text chat or email exchange to a phone call or video session, some modern collaboration tools give employees the option to quickly and easily move from one communication channel to another. This results in less back-and-forth to set up calls and meetings, fewer delays in collaboration and ultimately improved productivity. Beyond communication tools, these collaboration and productivity suites offer coauthoring — ensuring that all parties have access to the latest drafts of projects and files, and allowing employees to offer real-time feedback that helps to propel projects forward. This not only speeds up workflows but also can reduce errors.

REDUCED IT MANAGEMENT BURDEN: Disjointed collaboration environments not only create friction and bottlenecks in team project work but also add to the management burden of internal IT staffers. When collaboration tools don’t work intuitively, employees may flood IT with support requests, or even find their own workarounds in the form of shadow IT. Every new collaboration platform means more onboarding tasks, more password resets and more troubleshooting across incompatible systems. By standardizing and consolidating their collaboration stacks, organizations can reduce the volume of help desk calls, streamline administrative tasks and free up internal IT staff to focus on more strategic work.

COST SAVINGS: Initial investments in collaboration tools and services can pay off over the long term in the form of a lower total cost of ownership, as well as indirect savings through lower travel expenses, reduced churn and more efficient operations. Seamless, modern collaboration environments enable high-quality virtual meetings that reduce the need for expensive travel, and also allow teams to meet more frequently to move high-value projects forward. As leaders and employees gain experience with collaboration platforms, they often begin to use the tools for additional processes such as internal training, employee onboarding and companywide meetings. Over time, unified platforms also reduce the licensing and overhead costs associated with maintaining multiple collaboration tools.

As they seek to optimize their collaboration environments, many leaders and organizations turn to a trusted partner such as CDW for advisory, professional and managed services. These engagements ensure collaboration investments meet critical business goals, and they often lead to an outsized long-term return on investment.

STRATEGIC ADVISORY SERVICES: Organizations that partner with CDW for strategic planning eliminate the typical ad hoc processes associated with implementing new collaboration technologies. Rather than learning through costly trial and error, these organizations undergo rigorous readiness assessments, and CDW interviews stakeholders from across the enterprise to ensure that new investments meet business needs. During this early stage, CDW also addresses issues around compliance, data security and licensing strategies.

VENDOR-NEUTRAL SOLUTION MAPPING: Rather than pushing a specific collaboration platform, CDW’s solution architects help leaders determine which mix of solutions will best meet their business needs. This vendor-neutral advice helps prevent situations where customers feel boxed in with suboptimal platforms due to licensing or vendor lock-in, and it also ensures that collaboration environments are the result of deliberate needs mapping, rather than institutional inertia.

ARCHITECTURE AND DESIGN: Before a dollar is ever spent on new collaboration tools, CDW’s solution architects help organizations plan out integrations with other business-critical technologies such as customer relationship management platforms, enterprise resource planning tools, IT service management portals and human resources systems. This architecture and design planning prevents unwanted surprises and ensures that new collaboration tools begin helping organizations achieve their business goals from day one.

CONFERENCE ROOM PLANNING: CDW’s Collaboration Device Assessment allows organizations to assess up to 20 meeting rooms and current collaboration devices. During these assessments, CDW helps organizations document room dimensions and existing tech configurations, assesses current collaboration devices and provides a comprehensive report with tailored recommendations for devices that are appropriate for existing collaboration spaces.