Communication is key to any good relationship, and this is even more true when that relationship is based in a business setting. This is the case whether you’re referring to the correspondence between an organization and its clientele, or the collaboration between employees as they complete their tasks. Let’s consider four things small businesses can and should do to create a communications strategy that encourages their success.
2020 was a contentious—and for the wireless industry, momentous—year. Marking the official start of 5G networks, 2020’s events amongst mobile providers helped to reinvigorate an industry, while making some considerable shifts in the balance. Let’s consider some of these changes, and how the industry will continue to change for some time moving forward as 5G continues to grow.
With how business is conducted today, the capability of your workforce to stay connected while mobile is important. However, it can be equally important that this connectivity doesn’t come at the cost of their manners. Let’s go over a few ways to be more polite as you work remotely using a mobile device.
If your business is like most, you and your team likely rely on a schedule to keep your processes moving along efficiently… while also ensuring that everyone has something to work on at any time. However, this is often easier said than done, which is why there are now cloud-based software options that make your scheduling efforts a little smarter.
Technology grows more mobile with each passing moment, and emojis have popped up in places that nobody could have dreamt of. In particular, business communications have experienced a surge of emojis, but how (and why) is this the case? Aren’t emojis unprofessional? Shouldn’t they have no place in the business world? Well, let’s explore this a bit.
When Facebook released its Messenger app in 2011, it was primarily designed as a way for users to chat with each other outside of the main Facebook app. Since then, Facebook has added a plethora of new features and upgrades to Messenger, making it a tool that may have what it takes to meet the needs of your business.
Email is a central part of any functional modern office, but if you aren’t proactive in keeping your inbox under control, you could be wasting time on unnecessary messages or spam. If you want to get the most out of your workday, it’s imperative that you take back control of your business email inbox. Here are three ways that yourself and your employees can clean up your inboxes and waste less time throughout the work day.
There are some facets to IT that are universally accepted as important, such as security. However, there are also others that create some conflicting opinions between management and IT personnel. When surveyed, business leaders and IT management held vastly different opinions as to the importance of various IT tasks. Is there a way to unify these priorities?
Email is a solution that needs to be protected, lest you expose important information to any onlookers while messages are in transit. Encryption is one of the key ways you can make sure that your messages are safe, but email hasn’t always used this method to secure messages. In fact, it wasn’t until relatively recently that encryption became a staple of the major email providers.
Communication solutions for business are changing rapidly, and most of the new solutions go a long way toward using existing technologies that allow these organizations to save money and get more for the services they already pay for.
Your relationships with your customers and clients are reliant on one thing more than any other: communication. In order to optimize this communication, many businesses are leveraging technology solutions, and are enjoying a variety of operational benefits as a result. Is your business one of them?
How Powering Communication with Technology Directly Benefits Your Business
Choosing the right communications is one of the most important decisions that any business can make, as the decision you make influences many levels of your operation. On the one hand, there’s the internal side of things, where the different members of your organization can keep each other in the loop. On the other, your business needs to also maintain clear communications with your clients, offering them the value they’re seeking from your services.
The technology you use can offer some assistance in accomplishing as much.
From the solutions that allow you to more effectively communicate with your clients directly, to the potential cost savings that this technology can offer (thereby allowing you to pass these savings along to your increasingly loyal clients), there is plenty of upside to augmenting your communication practices via the right technology solutions. Here, we’ll explore some of the options available for your business to utilize.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Systems
CRM systems are a fundamental solution for any business interested in leveraging their technology as a means of improving their relationships with their clients and customers. These systems enable companies to better keep track of each of their customers and their interactions with them by centralizing all of this data into a single dashboard. This makes tracking this information far easier than if it were to be scattered about inboxes and voicemails.
Furthermore, these solutions offer integration with many other business applications that further simplify many key processes, like billing and acquiring signatures. They can even provide insight into social media behavior, allowing you to optimize your client acquisition strategy. A CRM solution can increase customer and client satisfaction by a reported 35 percent, making it an invaluable tool.
Automation
Managing your relationships with your business contacts and prospects is a formidable task, simply due to the fact that there are so many moving parts and processes when it is done correctly. It also doesn’t help that many of these relatively simple processes could potentially be overlooked, hindering your progress toward your business objective. Automating these processes can help to fix that.
Let’s consider a simple hypothetical example: let’s say that you offer a few industry-related products. Instead of having a sales representative man the phones, you can leverage automated workflows to expedite the process. Once your customer clicks “submit” on the order form, it’s possible for your sales team to be notified of what was sold, accounting to start invoicing the order, and your CRM system updated with the information… all without you needing to lift a finger. This allows you to focus more energy on your new customer, providing the highest quality service you can.
Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) Solutions
This approach to telephony has a few benefits, but today, we wanted to focus specifically on one: its portability.
One of the keys to fostering a positive relationship with your business contacts is to be available to them. How often have you reached out to someone, only to have to wait for a response back? You don’t want to be the cause of this irritation when someone reaches out to you.
One of VoIP’s biggest benefits is the fact that it can be leveraged from anywhere an Internet connection can be made, and many options offer a mobile application. Using a VoIP solution, your calls can be directed to your smartphone, enabling you to answer when your contact calls, proving your business to be reliable.
The Connection, Inc can help you implement these solutions so that you can work on your business relationships. To learn more, call (732) 291-5938 today.
Modern businesses have a lot more room for flexibility than in the past, particularly in regard to meetings. With the inception of conferencing solutions, organizations have access to more dynamic tools to make the most of their meetings. Determining the best one for you, though, is not easy. We’ll help you make that choice in the simplest terms possible.
Business communications, which is the succinct way to say the sharing of information between people both internal and external to a company, is a key player in that company’s success. Here, we’ll analyze the different types of communication that a business could leverage, and the solutions that best enable them.
With all the communication options available today, it can still be hard to beat the convenience and simplicity of the telephone. However, the phone is far from a perfect solution - it can be expensive, for one. However, what if there was a way for you to get a fully-featured telephone service with a variety of tools, without having to pay an arm and a leg?
How often do you find a message in your SMS inbox that has clearly come from a business, but you almost have to wonder, simply because the incoming number seems to be randomized? Google has taken notice of this challenge, and so has rolled out a means for businesses to confirm that they are in fact the ones sending a particular message.
If you are currently using text messaging via the Android platform’s Messages application as a way to communicate, taking advantage of Verified SMS is something that you shouldn’t pass up.
Take yourself out of the role of a business owner for a moment. Instead, consider the following from the perspective of someone talking to a business as a prospect or customer.
Let’s say that you are inquiring with a business about their services, or a deal you saw advertised, and you are exercising your capability to communicate through text. At least, you hope that you’re talking to the business… each time you have a new conversation, the number it comes from changes. Weird, right?
When a business uses Verified SMS, each bit of content that they send out is verified per message to have actually come from them. Once the message is verified, the user will receive it, tagged with the business’ name, logo, and confirmed with a verification badge.
According to Google, a message’s content is never revealed to them, and all of these communications are secure.
If you have an Android device, you can turn on Verified SMS to increase your own confidence in your own communications. Doing so is simple:
Communication is a key part of any successful business. Find out how The Connection, Inc can help you optimize yours! Give us a call at (732) 291-5938 today.
Social distancing has more or less confined many to their homes, and so many people have begun to adopt remote working to stay busy and to keep their workplaces operational. One way to assist these activities, VoIP (or Voice over Internet Protocol) is a massively helpful tool that many businesses use. Here, we’re going over why this is.
We’ll begin by reviewing the current situation.
As COVID-19 continues to make the workplace too risky to spend time in unless it is absolutely necessary, many people have committed to isolating themselves in their homes. Fortunately, we have the technology today that allows work to still be done in this situation. Thanks to the capabilities of VoIP technologies that lean on cloud solutions, remote work and collaboration become possible.
Let’s explore how:
If they’re going to work from home effectively, your employees will need the tools for the job, just like they would in the office. This includes a workstation, whether it's a laptop that travels with them or a workstation capable of accessing their resources remotely. It could also include a desk phone, which is something that is much more difficult to transfer from location to location, or at least, it once was.
VoIP now allows for this, as it runs the phone through the Internet instead of a separate dedicated line. Thanks to VoIP, your employees can make business calls with the same number they have in the office, without needing to be in the office itself. Software on their workstations, or an application on their mobile device, gives them access to their calling capabilities--along with many other features--even from home.
Furthermore, it isn’t as though your employees will no longer need to discuss business operations as they are working from home. Communications will still be critical, but residential services just aren’t secure enough to freely talk about these matters over the phone or even a personal Internet connection. Efficiency just isn’t worth sacrificing your security for.
VoIP can help you to mitigate these challenges. By using a VPN (virtual private network) in tandem with your VoIP solution, your conversation will be shielded by a tunnel of encryption.
Many VoIP platforms will incorporate additional communication tools, such as video conferencing, to increase their functionality. Conferencing allows you to have a face-to-face discussion with the other parties involved. This can help reduce the isolated feelings that many remote workers can develop, on top of improving the quality of your communications.
Find out more about VoIP solutions and how you can adopt them yourself! Give The Connection, Inc a call at (732) 291-5938 today.
Businesses around the world now find themselves in a situation unlike what most have ever seen. With so many trying to keep their distance from one another, many workplaces have deemed it necessary to close down for the time being or to operate remotely in order to reduce the risk they present to their clients and customers… but it isn’t as though these clients and customers are going to expect radio silence from these businesses.
Email is one of modern society’s best ways of staying in contact on both a business and personal level, but only if you’re effectively utilizing it. We’ll help you implement best practices and other methods to get the maximum benefit of your chosen email solution.
Chances are that you’re fed up with your in-house telephone network. It may have once been necessary to communicate with your employees and your clients by using a landline, but the modern office has since moved toward a more digital alternative in the form of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) telephony.
Basically, VoIP uses your organization’s Internet connection to transmit your call to the receiver. It’s efficient because it provides a service via one that you already pay for, rather than adding an additional cost to your budget. However, VoIP provides several other benefits that can save your business money. Here are two of the best ways that VoIP helps your business’s communications become more cost-effective.
VoIP Eliminates an Unnecessary Cost
As we just mentioned, since VoIP uses your business’s Internet connection, it helps you avoid the fees of going through your local telephone provider for all of your telecommunication needs. Plus, most telecommunication providers will try to bundle telephone services with others, which can make it seem like you’re paying for services that you don’t want or need. With VoIP, you’re using an asset that you already have (and need) to cut down on operational expenses.
Granted, in order to guarantee that your VoIP system experiences minimal operational trouble, you need to focus on improving your Internet connection by either working with your Internet service provider or auditing your router’s performance. We recommend contacting technology professionals before implementing major changes to your IT infrastructure--especially one such as VoIP.
VoIP is Flexible
When you add new users to your organization’s network, if often entails some intensive cabling to ensure that the new user’s technology is connected to the in-house network and the Internet. However, as the amount of technology you accrue increases, the amount of space that you have for new workstations and server units decreases. This results in a complex network infrastructure that makes it difficult to effectively optimize operations. This is especially the case if your business is growing.
VoIP makes it much easier to provide new technology without all of the complex cables. Rather than set new telephone cables for each and every new worker that you onboard, all you have to do is make sure that they have a steady Internet connection. This makes it much easier to provide phone systems to your employees. However, you still need to be mindful of bandwidth, as VoIP can put strain on an unprepared network.
Does your business need a reliable communications solution that’s capable of improving operations? To learn more about VoIP, reach out to us at (732) 291-5938.
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