The video conferencing environment has changed a great deal in the past five years:

• HD visual and audio quality is readily available costing well under $10,000 per endpoint.
• Multi-megabit per second Internet connections can be deployed in most locations around the world - even home offices - in 30 days or less and cost less than $100/month.
• Sophisticated software makes initiating a video session a pleasant and trivial procedure.

New applications and new classes of users are in a position to quickly capture the benefits of HD video conferencing. Independent research involving hundreds of business users show that organizations that leverage the video conferencing experience also have higher business performance: higher revenues per employee, higher customer satisfaction and higher employee satisfaction. As well, video conferencing saves time and avoids the hassles of modern business travel.

The Economics of Video Conferencing

Video conferencing is quite inexpensive compared to the cost of business travel in three major currencies – in dollars, in traveller time, and in terms of greenhouse gases as shown in below and depending on the locations involved and styles of systems implemented, impacts on the intra-company and inter-company travel spending can be dramatic.

The following example which compares costs, time and emissions involved in a 2-hour face-to-face meeting from Melbourne CBD to Brisbane CBD.

Figure 2 – Average length in minutes of face-to-face meetings versus room video conferences.

But video conferencing is not just about reduced travel and carbon dioxide avoidance. It has a big impact on business performance. In a study of 350 business users of video conferencing, the Top Performers being the largest consumers of video conferencing services compared to the Poor Performers or least frequent consumers had significantly stronger business performance:

• 20% higher customer satisfaction
• 72% higher employee satisfaction
• 85% more revenue per employee
• 20% more market share

More significantly than perhaps the cash costs avoided, are the hours and hours of time saved. Employee productivity is a powerful element of the business case for video conferencing. Saving 13 minutes in every video conference instead of face-to-face meeting as shown in figure 2 are helpful, but the real benefit is in avoided travel time as shown in table 1. Saving 7 hours of travel time, as in the comparison in table 1, includes avoiding time spent arranging the travel, time spent driving to/from the airport, time spent standing in lines, airport security and otherwise not doing the things the employee is paid to do. Travel does tend to involve a lot of unproductive and avoidable employee time.

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