Improving the Communications Systems in Your Business
The key to effective business, all businesspeople will know, is all about communication. It’s what will win you clients and broker your deals. It will increase your exposure and get things done internally in efficient and timely manner. So having the best-possible communications systems at your disposal, with an efficient organizational structure and policy with which to run them, will ensure that your business (large or small) is running at a competitive and lucrative level. From phones to emails and beyond, here are some methods to increase the efficiency of your communications systems.Perhaps accurately seen as a ‘dying’ form of communication in offices, much like the fax machine, letters are still an integral feature of serration aspects of businesses. Often in the form of invoices and documents that are requiring of a signature, most businesses will have a healthy amount of physical mail arriving and leaving the office each day. The biggest pitfall when it comes to the written letter is it's not getting to its recipient in time. Have an organized and proactive internal system so that this never happens to any of your letters.
When it comes to sending out mail, enhance your professionalism with branded stationary and smart, clear presentation that’ll tick all the right boxes in the mind of the recipient. It’s best to print out letters written on word processors instead of handwriting them. It avoids the risk of miscommunication. In the same vein, have a policy within your company of proofreading important letters so that you never send out shoddily-produced material that will reduce the credibility of your enterprise.
In the wake of recent scandals to do with cybersecurity and email leaks, it is paramount to have a robust email server that will keep the internal and external correspondences of your business private and contained without compromising on the speed and usability of the service. Personal email accounts used at work aren’t a good idea where this is concerned. Instead, centralizing your email system will enable you to monitor everything from the communications of your employees to the occurrence of bugs and viruses that can often strike through spam emails.
On top of concerns surrounding security, company emails should display the professionalism and integrity that you wish to put forward to the outside world. It’s therefore important to have a standardized sign-off for all employees, detailing their personal and contact details, and their place in the company, so that it’s easy for clients and prospective customers to get in touch with the correct person without a web of forwarded emails wasting the time of your employees.
Phone
Often the first port of call for customers interested in your product, phone calls rank as highly important parts of a company’s communicative structure to get right. Customers can quickly become agitated and upset if messed around on the phone, and end up sometimes bounced between employees with long periods of holding in between. Running your phone calls efficiently means better customer satisfaction and a culture that wastes neither the caller’s time nor your employees.
Set up with an affordable and reliable answering service, checking out the answering service pricing of companies that’ll help you manage incoming calls with the specific experience that comes from working for years in the industry. Give each employee who deals actively with clients a unique extension which they attach to emails and business cards, and can give out to establish intimate connections with valued customers who you want to keep on side. Lastly, have excellent telephone manner as your standard phone policy within the company. It may take training and evaluation, but it’s crucially important for top-notch customer service.
Website
The passive communicative platform that customers visit for information on your company and its services, nowadays it is absolutely unthinkable for a company to exist without a website. If yours is one such company, hire a web designer to establish some territory on the web as soon as possible. If you’re not online, you’re not competing, and you’ll be missing out on a large number of customers and a significant chunk of revenue. If you do have a website, ask yourself if it is well-designed and whether it can lead visitors quickly to an area that they’re interested in viewing.
Again, to properly assess the quality of your company’s website, it might be best to outsource to a company of professionals who can point out where your sitemap is lacking in usability while concentrating on maximizing your brand’s image and message through multi-media content and intelligent design. Customers visiting your website are expressing interest in you, and what you have to sell them, it’s vital to tailor everything on your site to tempt them to engage with your company, whether that be through an online store or an easy-to-use messaging service which you operate in conjunction with your email servers.
Social Media
Another of the more novel forms of communication which happen to have a huge effect on the visibility and trustworthiness of your business, having an active presence on social media (which means posting regularly on Facebook, Twitter, and other such platforms) will establish your company as proactive and media-savvy in a competitive marketplace. This is ordinarily a job best-suited to young employees who have their finger on the pulse of social movements, pop culture, memes, internet jokes and viral content so that they’re able to communicate at the right level with your social media followers.
Perhaps one of the best uses of social media is their capacity for subtle yet incredibly effective marketing. By publicly helping customers, such as posting messages to them on your public page, you’ll come across as engaged in excellent customer service. Likewise, a creative and inventive social media profile operator will produce content that people want to share. Shares on social media are exactly what makes products and companies go viral, increasing their exposure in ways that couldn’t be achieved even with paid-for marketing campaigns. Hiring the right staff to manage social media will greatly improve your ability to communicate and spread the word on these platforms.
Communications remain at the center of good business. Take a look at each area of your communicative platforms and consider these tips to improve the quality and efficiency of your business’ communications.