Over the past several years, the business world has seen the growth of a number of buzzwords related to collaboration and workflow integration. An overwhelming majority of these have remained nothing but buzzwords and haven’t really contributed much to the overall picture. However, a select few concepts have stuck and are helping small business leaders to get rid of the complex communication routines that most of these individuals find themselves dealing with.
Perhaps no other concept is revitalising business communications the way that channel integration has. This concept involves linking all of your various channels into one central dashboard that your crews can use to keep in touch with everyone else on their team as well as your clients. These may include everything from email to SMS text messaging as well as everything between.
Merging communications channels into a single arena
Chances are that your organisation uses more than one service to keep in touch with your clients. For instance, business phone systems are still used quite frequently in spite of the fact that they’ve largely been migrated over to some sort of VoIP console these days. Since these services are already connecting to other phones through the Internet, there’s no reason that you can’t hook them up to some sort of dashboard that can then provide updates and metrics to those logged into it.
Using this kind of technology has enabled entrepreneurs to keep a close eye on all of their business communications while also figuring out what kinds of calls have a tendency to take the longest. If one type of service call takes longer than others, then they’ll be able to make adjustments in order to attend to those kinds of calls whenever they come in. At the same time, these dashboards could include services like video conferencing and instant messaging right on the same screen, which may help to encourage the further use of said services.
Managers of smaller startups often find it difficult to switch between different modes of communication, especially if they’re understaffed and have to field most requests personally. By offering these choices on a single dashboard, a professional unified communications platform can eliminate most of the confusion associated with switching between different modes.
As the very definition of what communication is becomes increasingly blurred, some entrepreneurs have also found some other creative applications for this kind of technology.
Redefining what it means to communicate
It used to be that communicating meant sharing messages or ideas between two people. Now, though, it could mean sharing entire documents or books. IS departments working on behalf of independent entrepreneurs will often deploy a nebulous document repository in order to provide a place for people to send these things to one another.
Companies that are growing fast enough to employ a document management system will often need some way to recall documents in a way that’s nearly instantaneous. This is especially true of independent barristers, solicitors and registered agents who often have to consult a document while they’re in a call. Businesspersons who are in this spot don’t want to have to go looking everywhere for some docket or form, so it’s really beneficial to have these documents right next to the same interface that they use for everything else.
To some degree, this is helpful for collaboration as well. Say someone worked in a legal practice alongside several different solicitors. These individuals might find it difficult to stay in touch with everyone on their team, especially if they have to work on a single document together. This is pretty common in the legal field, but you’ll also see it in finance as well as many other disciplines.
By incorporating a document management tool into a communications dashboard, multiple users are free to work on forms together. This can greatly speed up processing of a case while also simultaneously helping to reduce the risk of an error. Streamlining communications can bring in multiple eyeballs to a problem, which increases the number of people on a project who could potentially catch a problem.
Most importantly, however, streamlined unified communication tools help to bring people together, and that’s one of the top ways to succeed in building a business.