small business communication

By Nishant Kadian

Basically, there are two parts in which business communications can be divided. First of them is connecting the employees with each other. Various departments and employees are required to stay connected constantly with each other to deliver their tasks on time and to keep the business in the fine shape. Basically, it is the ‘productivity maintaining connectivity’. The second form of connectivity is one between business and customer. It is another critical decider between the success and the failure as sales, support, up sales, reference, and resale arrive via this medium. So, it is the ‘profit earning connectivity.’

Productivity and profit for business ritualistically go hand in hand. So, both of them are essentialities for upright business performance. Depending on the type of business that one caters, the importance of one form of connectivity may be greater than other, but it can never be negligible. In this article, we look at the necessary solutions that are required to keep up an efficient communication in small businesses.

Hosted PBX

Private Branch Exchange (PBX) is telephone (or voice) communication medium for various departments and employees. It uses the internet to transmit voice calls. With a well-organized PBX solution, external callers can also reach the desired department directly using the extension dialing. As report suggests that of all the conversations taking place in global contact centers, the voice is currently most used, PBX is a very handy asset for businesses. But when it comes to small businesses, the challenge with the budget, infrastructure, etc. is quite large. To face the challenge head on, businesses should adopt Hosted PBX over the traditional PBX.

Hosted PBX is a cloud-based solution that does not require local hardware and infrastructure. Moreover, it supports cross-device compatibility so that user can connect using any device, such as- laptop, desktop, smartphone, etc. Availing it on the portable devices, employees can be connected without any geographical restriction. For the small businesses with limited office space, it comes as an irreplaceable benefit.

Unified Communications Solution

Voice calling is popular, but alone it falls short of meeting the present business requirements and it will collapse trying to meet the futuristic ones. Businesses demands for multiple communication mediums, such as – voice, video, IM, document sharing, etc. There are a number of solutions available in the market that can offer these mediums in diverse forms. However, installing different solution for each form is tiring and involves plenty of hassles. Then training the staff with the different employees with the variety of solutions adds more to the issues.

Unified communication is the assembly of different solutions on the single platform. So, you can connect with the staff on the same platform to voice calls, video calls, exchanging messages, real-time document collaboration, etc. Not only it simplifies the task of maintenance and connectivity, but also ensures that training efforts are minimized. All this leads to economic benefits as well.

Centralized Control and Monitoring

When a small business does not have centralized control in place, the situation is not gleeful. Even if it is concerned with only business communication, this scenario remains the same. Be it emails or phone calls, a reliable control and monitoring is the only way of maintaining the quality of communications among the employees and efficiency with the defined tasks.

On the positive note, most of the modern business communication tools offer the monitoring solutions. But the point is not about eavesdropping on the calls of your staff, but checking if the communication is contributing to the productivity.

Predictive Dialer/Auto-attendant

Contact center for the businesses is a great sales generator for many businesses over the globe. Hence, the efficiency matters immensely here. To serve that purpose, predictive dialers and auto-attendant are meant to serve out-bound and in-bound respectively. Predictive dialer is software that counts the agent availability and dials the lead automatically to connect the right calls. It can automatically filter out the wrong numbers to keep all the available agents on call and still saving them from the pain of manual dialing.

Auto-attendant is a feature in which machine answers the incoming call and connects to the right destination as per the need of the callers. It benefits in two ways by saving the need of a dedicated call receptionist and dwelling an enterprise level service to the caller. Thus, predictive dialer and auto-attendants are fine tools to keep the business callings efficient and effective.

CRM Integration with Connectivity Solutions

Customer Relationship Manager (CRM) is one of the most prominently used business software. From marketing and sales to feedback and support, CRM can streamline almost all the business processes that are concerned around the customers. Given the fact that business communications is the link between business and customers, the integration of CRM with communication solution, becomes close to a necessity.

Most of the technologies mentioned above in the articles, such as – PBX, dialer, etc. are compatible with most of the leading CRMs in the market. This goes in to show that industry trend and importance of amalgamation of the CRM and connectivity solution.

Nishant Kadian is an electronics and communications engineer, who enjoys exploring the business communication solutions. With The Real PBX , he writes about the technologies, such as- VoIP, Hosted PBX, Toll Free Numbers, etc. that help the businesses to connect with their customers better and make more profit.