Here we are, firmly entrenched in the 21st century. With each jump in technology – from the Industrial Revolution, to the Technological Revolution, to today’s Digital Revolution – each advancement seems to eclipse the previous. As such, if we think of the ways our parents, and even our grandparents, did business, the differences are staggering.
Perhaps the largest innovation made to date is the way we communicate, especially in business. As recently as 80 years ago, most long-distance business had to be done in person or, worse yet, through the mail. After the popular growth of the telephone, communication was revolutionized and business could be conducted from the convenience of one’s own desk.
These days, business communications have once again revolutionized, growing by leaps and bounds to meet the demands of an incredibly fast-paced corporate and retail world. Take a look at a few ways modern business communications are making commerce easier and more secure.
Source: Telzio
Say Goodbye to the Traditional, Expensive Business Line
If you have a traditional business line, how much do you pay each month for it? Now consider what features and benefits you get from it. Sure, you get call waiting, call forwarding, maybe even caller ID. Great. But suppose you could get more for less? Maybe even much more for much less?
When you switch to a digital phone system, you’re essentially plugging your phone system into your already existing Internet signal. This is called Voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP. When you make this migration, you’re bidding farewell to all the costs and expenses your phone company HAD to pay when they erected the telephone poles, ran the phone lines, and wired your building and phone jacks – then ever-so-conveniently passed those costs over to you and all of their other customers in the form of “fees.” With VoIP, your phone line costs don’t have any of those fees – simply the provider’s low rate which is incorporated into your monthly IT bill. On average, businesses report seeing average savings of between 50-75% after switching to VoIP.
As for features and benefits – they’re ridiculously comprehensive. Imagine programming certain phones with a predetermined number of rings before redirecting to another phone before going to voicemail. Picture yourself getting automatic transcriptions of voicemails texted to you. What if you could use ANY music you wanted for on-hold callers? Suppose you could run an updated report on all calls to see who called when, as well as on your data usage to see if you need more or less bandwidth? And that’s just scratching the surface of what VoIP can do.
Source: Forbes
Talk Face-To-Face, Even Miles Away
While phone calls are great to immediately connect with someone distances away, it does lack something – the personability of the face-to-face interaction. This is something our predecessors benefitted from before the modernization of the telephone – they were forced to travel in order to meet with one another for business. Of course, while business travel still exists today, it’s not nearly as prominent as it was then. But thanks to modern business communications, we no longer even have to leave our offices in order to enjoy the personalization of a face-to-face meeting – thanks to the prevalence of video conferencing.
True, video conferencing has been available for a while, but historically, the connections have been choppy at best, leaving more technical difficulties than productive facetime in its wake. However, faster processing and bandwidth speeds have largely solved that problem, allowing for video conferencing to become a truly viable solution for a personalized meeting with parties cities, states, and now even countries away.
Source: McKinsey Global Institute
Let Your People Talk
Please tell us you’re not one of those bosses. You know the kind – the ones who constantly walk the halls, checking cubicles and offices to ensure all employees are furiously working at their desks – not talking, not sharing . . . not collaborating.
We all know the type. They feel as though they’re not getting a full day’s worth of work from their staff if they’re talking with one another, even if it’s about work. Thankfully, that type of manager is becoming less and less prominent as the majority of businesses are realizing the power of collaboration.
Sure, your people can complete a project by themselves. But consider how much better the final product could be were they to be able to file share and discuss amongst themselves? An adjustment here, a tweak there . . . something the originator didn’t even think about when making the first draft.
This type of input is invaluable when crafting the best possible product for your clients. They deserve that kind of quality, and your team members deserve to be able to collaborate together. In fact, The McKinsey Global Institute found that productivity improves by 20-25% in organizations with connected employees.
Axxys Has Expert-Level Business Communications Solutions
We’ve listed three popular solutions of the modern business communications era. If you’re missing one, don’t remain stuck in the previous era’s technology. Let Axxys help. In addition, we can also help you by managing all your technology so you can always be sure everything is running in tip-top shape. Let’s have a conversation about how Axxys can modernize your business communications.
