Mitel Calls on Saba Centra Web Conferencing

Company Reduces Expenses While Boosting the Productivity of Its Partners in a Challenging Economy
By Maksim Ovsyannikov, Senior Director, Product Strategy

Today’s economic uncertainty has a lot of organizations considering new ways to control expenses. But there is always a concern that cost cutting will reduce a company’s productivity and limit its ability to respond quickly to market opportunities. Mitel, a trusted provider of unified communications solutions, has found that using Saba Centra, a comprehensive Web conferencing solution, can be a game changer, especially in a challenging economic climate. Mitel has been able to both dramatically reduce its training costs—for both its external reseller/partner network and employees—and simultaneously increase the productivity and responsiveness of its dealers’ technical representatives.

How has Mitel leveraged Web conferencing to achieve superior training and better business results? Let’s take a closer look.

Virtual Hands-On Demonstrations
Mitel provides voice, video, and collaborative communications solutions and services for businesses in more than 90 countries—working through a network of more than 80 offices plus nearly 1,400 value-added resellers and partners. Mitel’s portfolio of IP-based products and solutions is highly sophisticated and requires dealers to be well trained to respond to customer inquiries and effectively demonstrate the products’ capabilities to customers.

In the past, Mitel had technical specialists from its resellers and partners come to central classroom locations for up to two weeks to be trained. Needless to say, this incurred expensive air travel, accommodation, and other costs—in addition to pulling the techs out of the field and away from customers for days or weeks at a time.

With Saba Centra, Mitel now schedules half-day training sessions with virtual hands-on demonstrations. “We will have a product or solution in our location, and the participating dealers will have the same product or solution at their end,” said Lynn McCormick, senior manager, Training Development and Tools, Mitel University. “The instructor demos the solution to the students and, in turn, students can ask questions and share their own applications with the instructor.” Unlike basic online meeting software, Mitel’s solution allows instructor and student interactivity and tools to increase the effectiveness of learning, not just reduce costs.

Participants are given “homework” to do at their convenience after a session is complete. But because each virtual training session lasts only half a day, the techs can first get into the field and generate revenue by handling customer needs for the other half day.

“We have seen significant reductions in travel expenses for our resellers and partners in using Saba Centra for training,” McCormick commented. “Our dealer network has been very pleased with the increases in productivity by not taking their techs out of the field for extended periods of time. We have also avoided expensive and time-consuming road shows to roll out new applications to our employees.”

Making Web Conferencing Reliable and Simple
People have a real affinity for tools and technologies that are reliable and simple to use. This is not just valid in business—it’s equally true in our personal lives. Whether it’s a graphical user interface for a PC, an easy-to-program digital video recorder to capture a favorite TV show, or the familiarity of Facebook that encourages millions to sign up, people embrace simple, dependable tools.

When Mitel chose Saba Centra as its virtual training solution, one of the key reasons was Saba Centra’s reliability. “We have almost never had to call for support in the more than 10 years we’ve used Saba Centra,” said McCormick. “It basically works every time.”

Mitel also regards Saba Centra as very easy to use, not only because it’s highly intuitive, but also because it effectively simulates a face-to-face training environment. This includes the ability to:

• Express emotion and provide feedback during a demonstration
• Combine video and Web conferencing within a training session
• Easily share content and facilitate virtual hands-on learning

Unless people find Web conferencing tools natural and easy to use, they will continue booking airfare or, even worse, will avoid the training and meetings altogether.

Other Key Considerations for Web Conferencing
To get even more out of your Web conferencing solution, look for the following attributes or capabilities:

• Easy recording of training sessions or e-meetings
• The ability to publish material into a knowledge repository
• Support for voice-over-IP

Each of these should be available without hidden costs. Mitel is currently planning an upgrade of Saba Centra to easily record training sessions and publish and repurpose them for use by other students. Mitel is also looking at solutions that can be added to Saba Centra to enable dealers to log into training and access products and solutions virtually—without having the same equipment at their site.

“In the current economic downturn, we anticipate even more demand for virtual training,” McCormick remarked. “If dealers can avoid sending techs on the road for training, they’re going to do so.”

With Saba Centra, Web conferencing is a truly easy and affordable productivity solution and will provide real returns—even in an economic downturn. Get a free trial today.