How to Choose Communication Solutions for Your Business
Today’s society may be built on technology, but human society has always relied on communication. According to a study published by SIS International Research, businesses lose 17.5 hours of productivity per employee every week due to poor communication, and whether your business has eight or 800 employees, those hours add up to serious revenue loss. Upgrading your communication solutions could help you reclaim your company’s much needed time, but with the number of options on the market, it’s difficult to even get started.
Phone Systems
If your phone system is prone to downtime, unclear call quality, or routing difficulties, it’s probably doing more harm than good. Not only does an unreliable phone system give a poor impression to customers calling in, it also reduces the effectiveness of company communications.
Solution: A VoIP upgrade, whether hosted, premise, or hybrid, can help your employees get the information they need whenever and wherever they need it. Features like find me/follow me call routing ensure that calls can reach the right person even when they’re not at their desk, reducing downtime — and panic — when a timely answer is needed.
Messaging Tools
Email has been a mainstay in business communications for almost two decades, but by today’s standards, it can be slow and bulky. Wading through the spam, reply-all chains, and forwards to find the email you need takes time, and opens you up to a plethora of distractions.
Solution: As a part of unified communication solutions, instant messaging (IM) and chat tools can be a company’s internal communications lifeline. With built-in features like presence status, video and file sharing, and group channels, business IM tools make communication feel natural, whether you’re talking to the next desk or an office in another country.
Project Management
No discussion of business communication is complete without touching on project management platforms. Absent from your company, tasks can get lost and projects fall by the wayside. Set up ineffectively, employees may avoid it altogether.
Solution: Integrating your project management platform into other communications, such as scheduling apps, emails, and chat tools, can ensure that each employee’s to-do list is synced and everyone has the knowledge they need to complete projects efficiently. Rather than getting stuck waiting for someone else’s contribution to a task, everyone on the project can instead see exactly when they should be working on what.
Conferencing Tools
Anyone who has been stuck waiting on a conference call or struggled with quality on a video call knows the pain of lost time and dreads it. With an increasingly mobile and far-flung workplace becoming the norm, reliable audio and video conferencing are must-haves for businesses, but with so many bad experiences, it can be hard to get onboard.
Solution: Business conferencing tools have worked hard to deserve a second chance and made great advancements. With VoIP and other unified communication solutions, calls can be scheduled, connected, and maintained with greater ease than ever before.
If your company needs a communications facelift, there are many great options on the market to help. With easier ways to connect, you’ll be amazed at the time you and your employees can re-devote to productivity.
