It’s not just HR leaders losing sleep amid the Great Resignation. The number of employees saying “take this job and shove it” is also keeping CFOs up at night, according to a recent PwC Pulse Survey. Eight out of nine finance executives say their organization has been impacted by this event, and 81% are concerned that unusually high turnover plus accompanying labor shortages will continue to impact their bottom line.

Spending money to keep people isn’t always an option, though. Many organizations have yet to recover from the unforeseen expenses that arose from the pandemic. A Harvey Nash/KPMG CIO survey estimates that globally, during the first three months of COVID-19, organizations spent a collective $15 billion per week to adapt to remote work. Add to this the billions spent to sell to, serve and engage with customers from a distance, and you can see why many CFO’s purse strings are still drawn tight.

In talking with 8x8’s chief financial officer about today’s business challenges that include the Great Resignation, he noted that if you want to get a CFO’s attention on any new spend these days, the best way is to focus on cost reduction, and not just that — getting more while spending less. So, when it comes to tackling issues such as the Great Resignation, how do you add and keep employees all while saving money? One of the answers is to tap into the global talent pool fed by the new normalization of remote work and a forward-looking communications and customer engagement platform.

Should employees resign, the new global talent pool allows companies to hire highly-skilled people who may not have the same salary requirements as those, let’s say, in Silicon Valley — a win for the CFO. The right communications platform then gets them and keeps them, as well as current employees, onboard.

Getting more

Employee expectations for work-from-anywhere options and related technology continue to rise, as they look for employers who make it easy to communicate, collaborate, come together, and even create new forms of digital company culture. eXperience Communications as a Service (XCaaS) solutions that bridge the employee experience (EX) and customer experience (CX) by integrating voice, video meetings, chat, APIs, and contact center functionality on a single platform are becoming increasingly sought-after to provide that ease across the organization. The 8x8 platform is an example of this platform approach.

Spending less

While a cloud communications platform approach sounds great to current and prospective employees, how do you approach the CFO with a get more, spend less business case?

Here are 4 things CFOs should know about this type of solution:

  1. It attracts and empowers a global talent pool. According to the 2021 Adobe Workfront State of Work report, half (49%) of workers say they’re likely to leave if they’re frustrated with workplace tech. A platform approach to communications and collaboration helps organizations attract, onboard, and retain highly-skilled employees — from anywhere. Not all, nor any, of a company’s employees need be based in high-salary locations such as Seattle or San Francisco anymore. The same goes for the company headquarters.
  2. It delivers more value from a single vendor. One contract to negotiate, potential discounts from a higher quantity of seats, one set of analytics to prove the value of the solution and for the organization to glean employee and customer insights derived from a single solution — what’s not to like there?
  3. It also makes your IT department happy. A platform approach delivers a unified admin, a single SLA, one integration framework, less training, greater adoption, and added security versus having multiple solutions. In the 2021 State of Business Communications Report, 82% of IT leaders said it simplified administration and improved employee productivity, while 74% also said it reduced costs.
  4. Your sales and customer retention will increase, too. Contact center tools such as speech analytics, for example, can be used not only to train and inform agents, but also to train sales and marketing reps on potential upsell and cross-sell opportunities. Metrigy research has shown that organizations with an integrated UC and contact center platform reported a 14% cost decrease, a 57% customer rating improvement, a 37% agent efficiency improvement, and a nearly 100% revenue improvement.

Want to learn more about the value of a platform approach? Check out the 8x8 Platform Overview here.