Communicating with colleagues and customers is essential to the success of any small or mid-sized business (SMB) – which makes the technology that enables communications a mission-critical piece of a company’s IT infrastructure.
However, many South African SMBs are missing the opportunity to improve both productivity and customer satisfaction through modern mobile communications and collaboration capabilities.
But all is not lost: Selvin Kristnen, the managing director at Avaya South Africa, has an easy guide to help you determine the best collaboration solution for your small or midsize business.
- Keep it simple. By building a simple communications infrastructure, SMBs ensure low total cost of ownership, and ease of maintenance and administration will mean you don’t need a big IT staff to keep everything running. Solutions like Avaya IP Office are comprehensive, easy to integrate with existing infrastructure and designed specifically for mobile SMB workers.
- Choose a communications system that grows with you. For an SMB, every rand spent on technology has to deliver tangible benefits right now – what’s known in the industry as return on investment. But make are you’re able to expand cost-effectively as your business grows, or as you need extra capacity in busy times.
- Increase productivity with the latest communications technologies. Modern communications solutions enable employees to stay productive wherever they’re working – on the road, with clients, away from their desks, at home. By enabling a set of modern collaboration tools, including elements like video-conferencing, employees are also always available, and able to be easily reached by customers, partners and colleagues.
- Enable your teams with the mobile tools of their choice. A small business works just about anywhere – in the office, at a kitchen counter, in an airline seat. But they also want to be able to work on the devices they choose, including smart phones, laptops, tablets, home phones, even personal devices. By bringing instant messaging, presence, video and audio conferencing, and corporate directory access to mobile devices, your employees are always “in the office”.
- Build an always-on network. Small businesses today no longer have to struggle to stay connected in an always-on, increasingly virtual workplace. Always-on networks used to be the exclusive domain of big business, but today they’re not only well within reach of the average SMB, but they are easy to administer, energy-efficient and reliable.
Small businesses need cost-effective solutions that enable mobile and office employees to stay connected, so information sharing and decision making can move faster. By following these tips, they will be well on their way to securing a genuine competitive edge through their communications technology.