001: If You Build It, Will They Come?

Heads in the Cloud, hosted by Chief Marketing Officer David Portnowitz and Chief Knowledge Officer Graham Potter of Star2Star Communications, discusses business tips and trends in Unified Communications. Our conversations feature guests from the best of the industry.

In our inaugural episode, we chat with President and Principal Analyst at COMMfusion LLC, Blair Pleasant. We discuss user adoption in the rapidly expanding UC space. Blair shares her six-step strategy for engaging customers before a new service rolls out, and how to achieve the best ROI.

Show Links

Our guest: Blair Pleasant, President & Principal Analyst of

COMMfusion LLC and a co-founder of http://www.ucstrategies.com
Websites:
http://www.commfusion.com Analysis and Consulting on Unified

Communications, Collaboration, and Contact Center
http://www.ucstrategies.com Unified Communications Strategies - An

industry resource for enterprises, vendors, and system integrators
http://www.ucstrategies.com/unified-communications-strategies-experts/blair-pleasant.aspx
Coming soon: www.bcstrategies.com Sign up for beta access at http://www.ucstrategies.com
Blair’s twitter page: @blairplez https://twitter.com/blairplez
Blair’s Podcast: Consultant’s Corner http://www.ucstrategies.com/consultants-corner-podcast-blair-pleasant.aspx

Listen on Stitcher http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/american-entrepreneur/the-consultants-corner

Discussed Statistics:

Companies like Cisco, Avaya, Toshiba are moving away from hardware
Importance of customer service at every step
Studies show that successful deployment of UC occurs when users are enthusiastic about new tech prior to roll-out
VoIP services market is expected to grow to $140 billion USD by the year 2021

1 billion VoIP users by the end of 2017
Market will expand 10% every year until 2021
Experts project that by the end of 2018 only 6% of U.S. population will still be using traditional landline

phone network

Telecoms are losing an average of 700,000 landline

customers per month