A Whole New World

Cutting costs for NEC dealer partners. During an average month, NEC’s dealers access a combined total of 200 online training sessions. Each session typically lasts for up to an hour, providing tips for selling and installing NEC gear. IMS estimates that the online training sessions eliminate the need for as many as 50 training trips monthly that would have been taken without the availability of the online option. Estimating an average cost of $500 per trip, the aggregate savings for NEC’s network of dealers adds up fast. In a single month, the dealers collectively save $25,000 in training travel costs. On an annual basis, those aggregate travel savings total $300,000 for NEC’s dealers.

What’s more, Williams says NEC builds goodwill with road-weary sales representatives who may not relish adding to their travel schedules to attend training sessions in Texas. "A guy who has a family doesn’t want to be gone a week on an installation and then come back and have to go to a week’s worth of training," Williams says. "If he can spend that week with his family in the evenings, he’s going to be a lot happier and he’s going to sell more product for you than the guy who has to be on the road two weeks out of a month."

Employing webcasting to boost marketing effectiveness. NEC can spend significantly on programs that put its sales representatives on the road in order to provide training and support to dealers on a regional basis. IMS estimates that putting a single NEC executive on the road to interact with dealers costs the company $9,500 per month. Assuming that the traveling NEC sales representative can successfully complete 100 dealer contacts per month, the average cost of an outward-bound dealer contact is $95.

Using this $95 estimate as a baseline for the value of an NEC dealer contact, it can be extrapolated that the 200 webcast training sessions accessed on a monthly basis create an equivalent marketing value of $19,000. In short, NEC would have to spend $19,000 a month (a total of more than $225,000 per year) to re-create the marketing benefit generated through its webcasting efforts.

"I can actually just point back to travel expenses, and I win the battle every time," Williams says of his efforts to justify the company’s investment in webcasting.

Streamlining multimedia event development. Because NEC can use MediaPlatform to develop webcasting presentation templates, the amount of support that NEC’s multimedia production department must provide is reduced significantly. Using other publishing tools, NEC previously had allocated as many as three multimedia publishing professionals to take part in the process of capturing a presentation in a multimedia format suitable for online distribution. With its existing solution, one person can handle the same duties previously shared by three individuals.

Assuming an average of a half day to produce the content for a single webcast, the time savings are significant. Reducing staffing needs from three to one workers saves the equivalent of 1 full day of NEC staff time for each webcast produced.

Looking Ahead
In addition to the expanded lineup of training webcasts for 2008, Williams is exploring several other initiatives designed to integrate multimedia more thoroughly into NEC’s day-to-day operations. Recently, the company licensed another IVT product, called IVT Studio, that is designed to make it easier for executives to capture and record their own presentations. Williams now is considering strategies for capturing the content created via the IVT solution and reformatting it for distribution to portable media players, such as iPods.

Another likely focus for 2008 is improving the look-and-feel of the on-screen interface for NEC’s webcasts. Better looking presentations can only help improve the communications experience and the overall effectiveness of the webcasts, Williams says.

"You want people to stick around and watch this content," Williams says. "We can never afford to be mundane."