Effective Communication – Why You Can’t Afford To Get Left Behind
No matter your industry, effective communication is the very heart of your business. By communication, we mean communication technology. Because as a company, it’s no longer possible to hide behind outdated tech.
Your customers are increasingly connected to ever more advanced technology, and they will definitely notice if you’re not. It’s old thinking to assume that business only takes place during “normal” business hours. Consumers are always online, and they expect you to be too. Your employees need to be on call from anywhere, at any time. If they’re not, your competitor is sure to be. It only takes a few minutes for a customer, frustrated at your lack of response, to move on to your rival. So, if you’re hesitant to update your communications technology because you think you can’t afford to, you should really ask if yourself if you can afford not to.
The Cost of Effective Communication
What is effective communication, and why it’s so critical for our business? It’s not an overstatement to say that your business lives and dies by the strength of your network and communication services. You may have the most incredible product in the world, but if your website keeps going offline, or customer emails and social media comments go unanswered, how good your product is doesn’t actually matter.
Here’s the harsh and naked truth:
Your customers don’t care why they can’t get hold of you, and they’re not interested in your excuses. All they want is a pain-free solution to their problem. Because that’s really what a customer is, at the end of the day – a person with a problem. If you can’t solve it – and solve it now – they’ll find someone else who can.
So, you need effective communication. This means you need mobility, collaboration capabilities, unified communications and cloud services. This kind of interconnectedness means you no longer have to worry about finding the money to hire data experts and telephony whizzes. Using a hosted telecommunications service means everything falls under one network, using one provider. This means there’s no need to budget for system and infrastructure maintenance. Which in turn means you save money. Suddenly, the cost of effective communication doesn’t seem as scary as you first thought.
Advantages of Effective Communication
Interestingly, pretty much all the benefits and advantages of using technology to big up the efficacy of your business comms end up saving you money as well. They say time flies like an arrow, and fruit flies like a banana. You’re either smiling right now, or hearing crickets chirping. Either way, there’s no denying that time is money, and by saving one, you make more of the other. Effective communications technology makes it much quicker, easier and cheaper to transfer information around the world. It also drastically reduces the cost of talking to suppliers, employees and customers. We can video conference, for example, with many different people simultaneously, no matter where they might be.
Hosted communication services mean you always have a disaster recovery plan in place. This means all your essential comms functions continue working – even if the network crashes. Cloud-based companies recover much faster than others after a network disaster. In fact, those businesses that aren’t operating in the cloud may never fully recover – think about the cost of that.
Effective communications technology also allows employees to telecommute. This means they can communicate just as effectively when working from home as they can when they’re in the office. Over and above the convenience, one of the great advantages of telecommuting is that it creates feelings of employee empowerment because they feel more self-directed and independent.
The Future of Effective Communications Technology
When you think of how far communications have come in the past 20 years (remember dial up internet?), it’s easy to see that communications technology is advancing at an incredible rate. Business communication in particular is evolving rapidly and is set to undergo huge developments in the next few years. Emerging technologies, coupled with augmented and virtual reality and supported by a 5G network with near-zero latency? It’s happening people. The future is coming, and we must be ready for it.
Hopefully this has helped put the cost of effective communication into greater perspective. If you’d like further clarity on you can enjoy first class hosted business comms – even on a small budget – talk to the techies at Huge Connect. We know the importance of a truly seamless communications infrastructure, and we’ve designed our communications solutions with your business in mind.
