3 Powerful Mindsets That Build Better Communication in SMBs
Facilitating skilled, effective communication in a business doesn't happen by accident. This holds true at the enterprise level, where organizations spend a large portion of their budget perfecting digital tools that enable their teams to work from anywhere, at any time. However, the need for cloud communications tools is just as pressing for small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) that are making an impact on the economy today.
While SMBs may not think they have the resources to deploy enterprise-grade cloud communications solutions, a change in mindset can do wonders — like highlighting ways any business can achieve seamless connectivity between personnel and customers.
3 Mindsets for Better Communication
Here are three powerful mindsets SMBs can adopt today as they strive for better, more effective communication in a business setting.
1. Trust the Process and Give It Time
The decision to foster greater communication between teams, individual employees, and customers is just the first step. Getting to that point takes time, determination, and the willingness to experiment with communications tools.
This type of mindset can be considered from two angles:
Pre-implementation: One of the primary goals should be gathering feedback from teams and customers to better determine which tools are best. It's important to learn what they like about the current communications tools they're using and also what a long-term cloud migration plan looks like to the teams. Based on their responses, you can provide the proper digital tools to facilitate a seamless transition.
Post-implementation: This angle is more employee-focused and requires giving them the necessary time to adjust. Even if a new system fits the business processes like a glove, there's bound to be some confusion, lost productivity, and even friction as employees with established habits learn a new way of doing things. Here, education initiatives and other internal training steps can help make the transition easier.
2. The Buck Stops With You
As the business leader, you may have studied your business's communication practices and found data silos — points at which information should smoothly flow from person-to-person or department-to-department, but does not.
To build effective communication in a business, you're responsible for providing the tools and channels that can eliminate the silos. With an officially supported solution like unified communications as a service, for example, which consolidates communications channels and data on a single platform, employees can communicate without interruption, from anywhere. On the other hand, if employees are expected to find their own workarounds, it can result in inefficiencies, gaps in data collection, privacy breaches, and the use of unsupported technologies.
It's important to note that this idea doesn't just apply to data silos. Whenever communications roadblocks or inefficiencies arise, the presumption is that you, the leader, will tackle the problem to create a successful working environment that allows employees to better serve customers.
3. PBX and Other Single Points of Failure Must Go
Moving from managerial advice to the technical arena, it's critical that your business eliminate "single points of failure," or potential issues that could bring a large portion of your operation to a grinding halt.
For example, consider an SMB that relies on an on-site private branch exchange (PBX) for each of its three locations, and all three field dozens of calls from new and existing customers daily. One of the three is also the main location that houses the business's small, critical contact center.
In this instance, if any of the on-site PBXs experience a failure with significant downtime, it can cause significant damage to the business. That's especially true in the case of an outage at the main location, where any number of factors could result in protracted downtime, including:
phone company infrastructure failures
cut lines from nearby construction
on-site mismanagement
When you're relying on communications tools to carry out a vital part of your business, failure only hurts more. Solutions such as unified communications, which allow your clients and personnel to work over a variety of network types, bring a higher degree of fault tolerance. Using them to eliminate single points of failure can be vital to the success of your business.
Growing Effective Communication in Any Business
By approaching your business's communications with a long enough view and a few viable mindsets, you'll quickly see points of improvement that you can tackle. Spend the time, take accountability, and eliminate those points of failure to ensure your small business stays connected.
