Press Releases & Announcements

July 2007

The big “If” of IP: “If employees knew how to take advantage of it…”

So, you’ve invested in IP. You’ve conducted the half-day training courses for hundreds of employees. But your employees seemed to forget everything almost immediately, and the few who did try to leverage the great new features you’d implemented swamped the helpdesk with calls. And you’re still wondering when you’re going to see some payback.

Sound familiar? Jim Cosetta, president and CEO of 4What Interactive, has seen it many times before. “The biggest difference between IP and traditional telephony is that this is a new business tool that requires ongoing knowledge transfer—not just a one-time class,” he explains. In today’s fast-changing business environment, high levels of staff turnover and use of temporary employees mean that many employees won’t have received training. Also, companies often want to add new features to their IP systems, sometimes just after they’re already trained their employees. For all these reasons, traditional training approaches are inadequate for businesses trying to get the most from their IP systems.

In fact, research now indicates effective interactive-based training can increase end-user acceptance and future usage of new technologies by 200 percent—dramatically boosting organizations’ ROI. “People can’t take in everything during a class—they’re being bombarded with information,” explains Cossetta. “They don’t want or need to know everything—they only want to know how to get the information they need, when they need it. Now they can click on their desktop to get instruction when it’s immediately relevant.”

Without such on-the-spot support, staff are often afraid to start using new features because they don’t fully understand them. “Some people in big financial companies are literally too afraid to transfer a million-dollar call, because they’re not confident in the system,” Cossetta explains. “If companies want to get any payback from their IP investment, they have to provide staff detailed information on leveraging IP features—online and on demand.”