A Budget Breakdown for the Ideal Communications Ecosystem
Nowadays, there’s an app for everything. This can be a challenge for business leaders who are executing and managing 10 different apps for their employees. Between licensing and implementation costs, these complex ecosystems become costly quick.
Let’s consider fictional business, ABC Restaurant Group.
ABC Restaurant Group and their 4,000-person workforce is in pursuit of a new solution for their technology challenge. They need specific functionality for their deskless workforce, which includes:
- Corporate Announcements and Communications
- Training and Learning Management
- Help Desk Ticketing
- Task Assignment and Management
- Chat
- And more...
Leadership has a choice: buy six different solutions and integrate them together. Or, find a solution that seamlessly united all the functions into a single app. Below is a software licensing cost analysis for ABC Restaurant Group.
Corporate Announcements and Communications
While – like most organizations – ABC Restaurant Group uses email for corporate announcements, but they struggle with tracking engagement analytics. Are key teams reading essential messages? Do they have contact information for all of their deskless employees? Not only that, but employees are finding themselves inundated and overwhelmed with email.
The ideal solution:
- Designed for mobile
- Provides deep analytics on user interaction
- Streamlines notifications to prioritize the most relevant content
The “Bespoke” Solution: There are some solutions on the market made strictly for this and range from $3-6/user/month
Total Cost (low end): $3 x 4,000 users = $12,000/month = $144,000/year
Training and Learning Management
The ABC leadership team believes in empowering their staff with the tools to develop professionally. They want to build out robust training and resource tools so teams can do just that.
The ideal solution:
- Designed for mobile
- Allows for easy creation of course materials
- Includes simple tracking of employee completion
Tech Options: The major solution out there is Saba with a price range typically from $3.50-$6 per user per month.
Total Cost (low end): $3.50 x 4,000 users = $14,000/month = $168,000/year
Help Desk Ticketing
ABC Restaurant Group needs a Help Desk to support employees troubleshooting and issues from technology to business questions.
The ideal solution:
- Works on mobile
- Is simple for users to create tickets
- Easy for teams to manage tickets
- Includes analytics to track the state of every ticket in the system
Tech Options: They looked at solutions like Zendesk and Service Now. Pricing typically ranges from $5-10 per support agent.
Total Cost (low end): $5 x 100 users = $500/month = $6,000/year
Task Assignment and Management
Leadership wants to provide a tool to keep teams organized and focused on priorities.
The ideal solution:
- Offers a simple way to distribute tasks to their workforce
- Tracks completion
- Includes direct communication and comment features
Tech Options: Tools like Asana have free options. Features like custom fields and forms have additional cost. Premiere pricing is approximately $10.99 per user per month.
Total Cost (low end): $10.99 x 4,000 users = $43,960/month = $527,520/year
Event Management
Leadership wants to be able to invite users to online and in-person events. Managing invites at scale becomes increasingly difficult without the right platform.
The ideal solution:
- Designed for mobile
- Includes tracking analytics
- Makes it easy to access event information
- Has verified security standards
Tech Options: Eventbrite offers their tool for free, which can be great for smaller organizations. Leadership will have to manage employee privacy and track data, which can get cumbersome as the organization grows.
Total Cost (low end): $0
Chat
Real time chat is simple and lets people instantly communicate.
Tech Options: There are a ton of solutions on the market that provide chat, and Slack is an industry leader. Their pricing is $6.67 per user per month.
Total Cost: $6.67 x 4,000 users = $26,680/month = $320,160/year
The Final Tally
In software licensing costs alone (leaving out the cost to integrate these tools), ABC Restaurant Group was looking at $1,165,680 per year. In a world where it costs less and less to build software and hardware, affordable, robust, user-centered software solutions are becoming a reality.
Konverse, the all-in-one hub solution costs $65,000 a year, and $1.25/active user per month. Is your team ready to transition to an all-in-one communications software designed for the future of deskless work?
