Your Communications Tools Have to Match Your Needs

Communications are a crucial part of every business, and today there are more options than ever. You have your telephone, email, messaging, and other forms of communication that, while valuable in their own right, may actually serve to complicate processes. In today’s blog, we briefly discuss the different parts of a business communications platform. 

The Telephone System

Let’s get right into it. Typically every business has a telephone system. Whether you have a single phone or you need a solution that provides your team with dedicated numbers over multiple locations, using the telephone is a big part of doing business. With that in mind, your telephone system needs to be able to support the rest of your business’ communicative efforts. 

The traditional telephone service is still around, and even though they’ve had to drastically change their fee structure, they still operate basically the same way. Many businesses have switched over to a VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) platform that works through their Internet connection. This allows them to remove one vendor, but they often simply use the VoIP system through their ISP, which doesn’t offer the functionality, scalability, and flexibility of a dedicated hosted VoIP provider that offers some really interesting and innovative features that can really help any organization that has employees that aren’t necessarily at their desk all the time. If you are looking to unify your business communications, a VoIP solution is at the center of the strategy.

Email

Another popular communication platform for any business is email. There’s a lot you can do with your email system. Not only can you typically integrate all of your other mission-critical systems with your email system, you can also easily scale an email system to your needs without much effort. A lot of businesses use productivity suites that offer email with the product. The most popular are Google Workspace (Gmail) and Microsoft 365 (Outlook). This removes the need to host and manage an email server and it works in unison with the other collaboration apps that are offered by the platform, but we’ll get there in a minute. 

Since email is the most targeted system by hackers and scammers, it can be problematic. Today’s email platforms offer a lot of options to help keep unauthorized users out of email accounts. Options like integrated spam and phishing filters, built-in encryption, and two-factor authentication can work to mitigate some threats, there needs to be a strategic training system in place to teach your users how to spot potential scams, as well as systems to test them properly. Email is a great tool that can build some serious efficiency into your processes, but it can also be the conduit outside entities use to breach the walls of your network and wreak havoc on your network and infrastructure. 

Conferencing

For many workers, the fact that you can have a multi-person, multi-location, virtual meeting on your phone is really cool. Younger employees may not find it all that impressive, but for many workers, it’s a technological marvel. With the mobile state of business nowadays, video conferences are part of the normal way of doing business. Like email, many organizations will use the solution that comes with their productivity suite, but you should find the one that has the cost, functionality, and features you require to meet your needs. Not all video conferencing solutions are the same and the ability to integrate your conferencing software with other applications you depend on can really have some value. 

Messaging

Obviously, messaging is a crucial part of person-to-person communications, even if it is considered kind of unprofessional in a lot of business settings. Since so many people don’t always like to answer their phone when they are on the move, however, messaging is an acceptable and practical option; especially for teammates. With so many options out there offering all types of promises about their messaging applications, it’s hard to whittle it down. If your team is depending on text messaging for work purposes, you definitely want to provide them with a platform with one, centrally managed option for their workplace messaging.

This is where you have to make a decision about what interface works best for your business. Do you choose an app that offers end-to-end encryption to keep data secure or do you depend on the option provided by your productivity suite? Many businesses wrestle with messaging, because a lot of times, it is a non-essential feature of your VoIP system, collaboration platform, or productivity suite, but you will be surprised how important some of the information sent in one-off messages can be to your business. 

Collaboration

This brings us, finally, to the collaboration aspect of your digital workplace. Today, there are powerful applications that offer all types of features to improve your organizational management and collaboration. These applications often work with all of your chosen communications to make the process of collaboration that much easier. They offer person-to-person chats as well as custom chat options so that you build a whole system to manage data, access, scheduling, and communications without a lot of hassle. If your team struggles with communication, and it’s holding your business back, a collaboration app can transform your business.

The ability for any team to easily work together without massive headaches will make any business better and software can help that become a reality. Beyond the collaboration app, many of today’s productivity tools offer collaborative options that can speed up turnaround times and make it easier for people to quickly and easily complete tasks that not too long ago would take two or three times as long. 

Mobile

Today, employees need to be able to do anything they can do at their workstation on their smartphone. Developers once struggled with the creation of mobile apps that matched the features of a PC, but since mobile productivity is a priority given the immense amount of people that use smartphones for nearly everything they do, you need to have a plan in place to integrate your users’ favorite device into your business communications strategy. Obviously, it’s a great communications tool as it is the ultimate platform people rely on to call, message, meet, and email one another. 

Getting people to use it for work is worth a try. Many VoIP platforms offer a mobile app that allows users to access their work calls right from their mobile device, adding value to an already robust platform. Aside from that, most business communications apps can be easily deployed on devices. Android offers a whole work profile that admins can use to separate work apps from personal apps, while admins can set up a container on an iPhone that allows them to manage work apps on user devices.

Unifying Communications

You often hear about unified communications (UC) and wonder how it works. Basically, a UC system runs all of the communications platforms you choose for your business through a central application that provides users (and administrators) a way to consolidate communications into one application.  If you are a frequent reader of this blog, you’ve no doubt heard about a password manager, which centralizes all your passwords in one place. Communications are a little more complex than passwords, but it’s the same general principle. 

Not only does a UC system allow users to connect seamlessly across the different platforms of your communications tools, it allows them to quickly switch between them. This makes the whole communications process more efficient and can really enhance the speed of your collaborative efforts. UC platforms also integrate with many CRM or other management applications to make workflows much smoother.

Communications is About People, Not Technology

There are some very basic elements to creating a good communications platform. That is no guarantee that your business will be good at communications, however. It comes down to your employees understanding and using the communications solutions you choose. No matter what tools you choose to deploy, you need to have a thorough training program in place on how to effectively use them. You should always take a little time and train your people on your expectations for communication regardless if you have a single phone line or a completely unified communications system.

If you would like to talk to one of our IT experts about your business’ communications and how you can improve your whole business with these enhanced communications, give the IT professionals at ImageSys LLC a call about it today at 301-740-9955.