Winning the Race – 3 Reasons You Can’t Let Your Communications System Fall Behind

Like winning athletes, high-performance companies are always looking for new capabilities to help them beat the competition.

We’ve all watched high-performance athletes lose a race by mere fractions of a second. It’s heartbreaking because whatever the margin, it meant the difference between winning and losing.

The business world isn’t much different. Competition is extremely tight in almost every industry. It’s too easy to be left behind by competitors who are faster to market, work more efficiently, and do more to keep their customers happy.

Your business systems are crucial to increasing your competitive edge and winning the race, no matter what industries or markets you serve. Every system you rely on must reliably operate at peak performance levels — especially your business communications system.

You can’t afford to let your communications systems fall behind for many reasons, but here are three important ones.

1. Seamless Communications Accelerates Time to Market

It takes unconstrained teamwork across every area of your organization to get new offerings to market faster. Every member of every team needs the ability to quickly and easily connect, collaborate, and share information from anywhere, at any time.

If your communications system isn’t up-to-date, your teams can’t leverage the latest features and functions available in the web, mobile, and desktop applications they rely on to stay connected. Like high-performance athletes, your teams need every advantage they can get. No matter how seemingly small that advantage is, it makes a difference – especially if you multiply the effects across your organization.

Keeping your communications system up to date means your teams always have the most recent voice, messaging, video conferencing, screen sharing, and file sharing capabilities at their fingertips.

2. Lost Productivity is More Costly than You Think

A Grammarly Business survey of over 1,600 business leaders and knowledge workers found that 72% of the workweek is spent on communication and collaboration. When you add up the lost time, those inefficiencies cost more than $1.2 trillion, or $12,000 per employee annually.

But productivity losses aren’t only measured in dollars. Almost half of the survey respondents also said that inefficient communication and collaboration had created friction with co-workers and other departments. While those losses are more challenging to quantify, no business can afford them.

Communication technologies and systems that provide more features and functionality are crucial to making communications and collaboration more efficient. The capabilities that were cutting-edge just a short while ago are no longer at the forefront of what’s available.

3. A Great Customer Experience Depends on Great Communications

Customers’ communications with your organization are central to their experience, increasing revenue. The key is to ensure your customers have a great experience at every touchpoint across your organization. To do this, you need to look beyond your contact center technology and the service your contact center agents provide and take a holistic approach to the customer journey.

Every single person in a company plays a direct or indirect role in determining whether it provides consistently good or consistently bad human or digital interactions. Your business communications system plays a significant role in those human and digital interactions.

When evaluating the current state of your current communications system, think about how customers interact with your sales team and employees located at remote sites. Also consider how your internal teams connect and collaborate to deliver on customer requirements, especially when customized solutions are required, delivery dates change or supply chain issues slow down processes.

If your communications system doesn’t provide the capabilities needed to ensure customers have the best possible experience, they can become disillusioned. Worse, they may stop calling.

To maintain your edge to beat the competition, schedule your Business Communications planning session today. Contact TCI at (703) 321-3030 or GetHelp@tcicomm.com.