Delivering bottom line benefits that appeal to the FD

When considering digital signage for the workspace, how can you convince the budget holder or decision maker that it is worth 'investing' in your solution?

With any new business solution an essential part of the roll out is training. Only by explaining and making sure everybody understands the value of the new system can you really say your new solution has been successfully adopted.

OK, so you could use digital signage to give users hints, tips and links. This would ensure that they see the links, but how do you measure and justify this from a business benefits position and make sure you know whether the team has acted on what they have seen..

At Plasmanet we're undertaking discovery programs with our customers. This gives us the opportunity to ...

• Identify the communications challenges
• Measure KPIs against these challenges
• Run a communications campaign
• Measure the difference
• Demonstrate the saving / benefit

Which might mean (in real world practicality) for a particular company

• we know that a lot of our support and training is associated with getting to grips with company wiki
• we identify how many calls and emails we get asking for support. We know the percentage of adoption of wiki.
• we run a campaign, communicating the importance, guidelines and links to wiki (using screens, text, email, blackberry etc.)
• we measure the number of calls / emails to support and the number of unique users of wiki
• we show how successful the campaign was and how adoption has changed and what mediums were most successful in attracting new users and how the profile of support calls changed

Using a tool such as plasmanet V8 you get to display the message, send it and measure the team's response. This allows you to measure how many of the team and who acted upon the message. By taking this approach you can match up who needs training, who has had training and how many support calls are taken and what level of training course is being demanded.

With a reduction of training and support costs, you have your bottom line benefit. By utilising plasmanet, AV, digital signage or any communication system can now be justified in bottom line benefits that should appeal to the FD and the business.

But, what about home workers - do they get the message.

Well, no! They could do though. In my next blog I'll talk about the home worker environment, and then the opportunities that an office based business can benefit from home worker infrastructure.