How much does your customer communications solution cost? Probably around $700 a user? Maybe less? Maybe a little more?
What about all the things you aren't counting in those dollars and cents? The missed opportunities to build a loyal customer, or the hours spent trying to contact the right employee to handle a task, for example.
Your communications systems don't just cost a flat rate or subscription fee. If you're taking the wrong approach, they can cost you a lot more than that.
Limited Communications Can Create Limited Success
Communications is changing, within your own organization and within the business environment as a whole. If you want to keep your costs down, you need to eliminate the areas of communications where you're failing, such as a single-channel strategy and move towards having multiple and unified communication channels.
Limiting communication of any sort — consumer to business, customer to rep, employee to employee — is a sure way to cost yourself valuable time and potential sales. Vastly limiting the avenues people take to reach each other or to reach your business destroys opportunities for solving problems and increasing efficiency.
So a single channel strategy could really harm you. What other profit killers might you be missing?
Limited communications means you limit your talent pool, describes Jim Tynan, Twinstate's VP of Sales. You could be losing out on top talent who simply need to be mobile in order to work with your team, all because your communications solution isn't up to snuff.
You could be missing opportunities with internal communications, too, through limiting individual and team productivity.
As Tynan puts it, "You need to ask yourself: Am I losing customers? Am I losing potential employees who might be an asset to my bottom line? Or losing my supervisors' ability to manage productivity because I’m not giving them some of the tools to do it?"
If you answered yes to any of those, your customer and internal communications solutions are costing you too much, and it's time to make a change. So what can you do?
Go Omnichannel
You already know that millennials jump at the next and newest communication technologies. They've carved out a nice little spot in the heyday of electronic communications, where hordes of them are the type who remember the past, but understand the future, allowing them to quickly adapt. So they've acted as trendsetters, even as they've entered their 30s. And one thing millennials have definitely made trendy: the power of choice.
It's not just a certain generation that enjoys choice, though. While 62 percent of millennials want your company to engage them through social media, in just 2014, 41 percent of senior citizens didn't use the internet. So they need options, too. You need to be omnichannel to be most effective in gaining loyalty.
Says Tynan, "You need to open avenues through web channels, text, email, video chat, social media. If you're not familiar with these new avenues, find someone who is! Find someone in your organization who knows about social media. Harness that person. Find out what they do. Open up all avenues. Be ready to communicate with your clientele."
The good news is that all of these tools can work with the technology with which you're already familiar, like your phone lines. So what you'll need to do is come up with a mechanism that allows people to choose their medium — both externally and internally.
Internal Communications Needs
Internally, it makes sense to unify all channels of communication to make things more simple for your employees, too. The 9 to 5 work day is being blown away. To prepare for the current shift from time-based employment to task-based, consider which tools you use now to empower employee efficiency, and which you'll use in the future.
Not all of these tools will be communications focused. Business apps in the cloud, like SharePoint, for example, can significantly increase productivity and flexibility. And added flexibility gives you distinct advantages: less need for real estate expansions, the widening of your talent pool, and talent pay set at a rate that makes sense for you.
There is a challenge here, but a challenge you should tackle today. Says Tynan, "You don't want to think about these things 10 years down the road when you're already right in the middle of the shift." If you're not thinking ahead, you can't possibly plan ahead.
So What Should You Look for in a Communications Solution?
If your communications are costing you, start shopping around. Any solution you choose should be three primary things: efficient, available to your employees, and multichannel.
Consider that your net cost for a cloud solution might be more expensive due to a subscription model. But that doesn't mean it's costing you more; it can positively impact your bottom line through freeing up your people, allowing for constant availability, allowing speedy migration to new technologies, and eliminating administrative obligations.
Those benefits sound much better than all those hidden costs, don't they?
Originally published on 11/15/2016