Partner POV | The True Cost of Meeting Downtime

This article was written and contributed by our partner, Logitech.

In a fast-paced business, efficient meetings are vital to progress. They are the catalysts for decision-making, innovation, and collaboration. Whether the goal is shaping strategic direction, fueling inspiration, or fostering mentorship, meetings enable businesses to move forward. The success of meetings certainly relies on the skill of meeting organizers to keep conversations on point. But there is another factor that also plays a critical role: the cohesive integration of hardware, software, and services provided by different vendors. Keeping all of these systems running is complex. And when one element in this tech ecosystem breaks down, meetings are impacted, time is lost for meeting participants, and the experience for employees and other attendees suffers. In this paper, we explore how costly meeting downtime can be for business and employee success and offer suggestions for how to handle and avoid downtime. Specifically, we look at:

• The impact of downtime on hybrid meetings
• The high cost of meeting room downtime
• Ways to minimize and prevent downtime

The high cost and impact of meeting room downtime

Keeping meeting rooms up and running is vitally important for business. As one of our customers told us, "Meeting spaces are highly visible, they have to work. That's what people are coming back to the office for." So it's no surprise that 76% of respondents say video conferencing is a top three technology priority, according to a recent study by Wainhouse. As video conferencing technology grows in importance and priority for organizations, responsibility for implementing and maintaining these systems increasingly falls on the IT team, adding to their existing workloads. After all, it's IT that will be called in to consult and maybe lead the implementation of new solutions — and in the end, IT is the go-to team when something doesn't work. Downtime in meeting rooms causes stress and takes time away from IT's other responsibilities. Given the complexity of these video systems, it can be hard to find the root of the problem when an issue arises. Fixing the problem can often take longer than expected. We'll look at some of the most common issues related to meeting room downtime, namely:

• Recovery costs
• Mean time to resolve
• Lost productivity and revenue
• Impact to employee satisfaction

Recovery costs

Depending on what your IT department looks like — whether you have in-house support or you've outsourced it — restoring systems and services after downtime can involve significant expenses. You can expect to spend money on system repairs or replacements and spend time on technical support, data recovery, and reconfiguration. Costs include the hourly rate of service technicians, additional fees for emergency service or overtime work, and the cost of any hardware that is replaced. A new video bar, for example, can cost between $1,000 and $4,000 plus technician time. But there are other costs that don't often show up in dollar form. These include the cost of interruptions, especially when IT professionals are taken away from more productive work. Troubleshooting, repair, and follow-up communications take time no matter how small or big the issue.

Measuring mean time to resolve

Tracking mean time to resolve (MTTR) is important because there is a strong correlation between MTTR and customer satisfaction, according to Atlassian. (For the purposes of this whitepaper, customer satisfaction refers to how employees feel about the technology they use.) MTTR tracks not only the time spent diagnosing and fixing an immediate problem, but also the time spent ensuring the issue doesn't happen again. This metric is useful as it measures how teams resolve single issues and how those efforts improve over a longer period. To calculate MTTR, add up the full resolution time during the period you want to track and divide by the number of incidents. Let's say that in a single incident your video conferencing devices were down for a total of three hours in a 24-hour period, and technicians spent an additional two hours resolving the issues and putting fixes in place to ensure the system outage doesn't happen again. In total, that's five hours spent resolving the issue. This means your MTTR is five hours. Depending on when these five hours occurred, the cost of downtime will vary. Naturally, you want MTTR to be as low as possible. However, it's important to note that MTTR doesn't consider the circumstances. So if you want to know why and how an issue surfaced, you have to do some further digging.

Lost productivity and revenue

When a meeting room isn't working, it directly affects the people participating. Depending on the nature of the meeting, the outcome of the downtime varies. Many times, the "only" downside is that attendees have to spend a few minutes searching for a new room. This may not seem significant, but if it happens over and over again, imagine how much time is wasted finding a new space and trying to restart the meeting. Not all meetings are critical, but some clearly are. Consider a board meeting or an important customer call. In the case of downtime for meetings like these, important decisions might be delayed and progress stalled — and revenue can be lost due to a bad impression with customers. Productivity loss consists of both tangible and intangible factors. One way to measure it is to take a look at hourly salaries. Even if your meeting rooms are down, people still get paid. So to calculate lost productivity, think of your employee's hourly salary, multiply it by the time wasted due to meeting room downtime, and then multiply the number of people in the call.

Low employee satisfaction

In general, employees should spend a minimal amount of time and effort thinking about the technology they use or trying to make it work. Technology malfunctions and situations like meeting room downtime create a poor experience for employees and erode job satisfaction and employee morale. While a meeting room being offline isn't likely to lead an employee to quit their job, it does create a negative impression of the organization and particularly the IT team, which (fairly or not) is usually blamed when technology doesn't work as it should.

How to minimize and prevent downtime

There's no fool-proof way to avoid incidents. But in essence, reducing downtime-related costs lies in good preparation and having the right processes and tools to resolve issues as quickly as possible. With that in mind, let's consider the pros and cons of three different approaches for what you can do:

Approach 1: Rely on internal expertise and standard Logitech business service for meeting rooms

Approach 2: Outsource your meeting room support to a systems integrator tied to the OEM (original equipment manufacturer)

Approach 3: Get personal, expert knowledge, support, and a backup plan with Logitech Select, an enterprise-grade service plan for meeting rooms and solutions

OPTION 1: Create an internal team with meeting room expertise

This might seem the most obvious approach: Train existing IT admins or hire techs who specialize in video systems to make sure issue resolution is quick. Internal teams can manage and maintain the deployment using Logitech Sync and standard business support.

PROS

The biggest advantage to this approach is that the expertise stays in-house (unless people leave). This means people are generally available when you need them. It also means that you can develop and access your own metrics and monitoring capabilities, provided you invest the time to create that custom functionality. As a backup, your team can also turn to Logitech's standard support for guidance during business hours.

CONS

Your existing IT team may not necessarily have the bandwidth to take on a new range of technologies outside their core competencies. That could mean adding new headcount – and additional budget. There's also the issue of scalability. Can you hire the talent? How quickly can the team ramp up and then scale up in a rapidly evolving environment? Remember that even if you hire the right talent, you still need to implement tools for them to do their job effectively. By choosing a premium service plan with benefits such as prioritized technical support and extra management features, you can ease the management burden on your IT teams.

OPTION 2: Outsource your meeting room support

The number of consultants offering this service makes outsourcing an appealing idea.

PROS

There are many great service partners who can design and install your video conferencing equipment and keep it up and running through ongoing management and monitoring, along with remote and onsite assistance. Service providers can offer your internal team extended capabilities, scalability, and SLAs to guarantee your uptime requirements. Logitech partners with many technical experts who are also backed by Microsoft, Zoom, or Google, so you know you will be in good hands with these service partners.

CONS

If your service partner lacks the relevant certifications and training from platform providers and the OEM, they might not have the expert knowledge needed to effectively support and guide you. If the consultant doesn't have a special contract with the OEM, you could be missing out on front-of-the-line access to fast product replacements and priority escalation support.

OPTION 3: Get personal, expert support with Logitech Select

In designing Logitech Select, our goal was to create an enhanced service plan that provides the ultimate level of support organizations need to ensure their meeting rooms stay up and running and collaboration is never interrupted.

PROS

Logitech Select offers a number of benefits for organizations large and small. With 24/7 technical expert support and next-business-day product replacements, we help you keep your organization operating at maximum efficiency. Powerful software management and insights from Logitech Sync reduce daily maintenance and let you resolve issues before they affect your business. Select is also a good complement if you already have a service partner responsible for setting up your video conferencing solutions.

Is Logitech Select right for your organization?

Created to support video collaboration in hybrid workplaces, Select provides four broad benefits to organizations:

• Optimized performance for video collaboration spaces with little to no downtime, for seamless day-to-day operations
• Protection of your Logitech devices up to five years
• Powerful and proactive software features that help IT save time on daily maintenance and reduce downtime-related costs
• Full product life-cycle support, from implementation and ongoing support to advice on future investments

Specifically, Logitech Select offers:

• Global 24x7 expert, technical service with 1-hour service level objective (SLO)
• Product coverage for up to five years
• A designated service manager who will act as your single, technical point of contact
• Next-business-day return merchandise authorization (RMA)
• Onsite spares that are instantly available if and when you need them
• Advanced software for management, insights, and alerts through Sync Plus

Is a service like this right for you? It might be if…

• Your meeting room solutions include hardware, software, and service products from multiple vendors and you want a central point of contact to assist with diagnosis and fixes
• Downtime in your meeting spaces is simply not an option
• Your organization needs to build out, deploy, and manage more new meeting spaces at scale
• Your organization is taking a hard look at its real estate needs and requires data on how to use space more efficiently
• Your organization doesn't have sufficient internal expertise and resources to manage the growing number of meeting rooms and video conferencing devices