Upgrading your current communication strategy

A communication strategy is essential to any modern business, shaping how you provide information to stakeholders both internally and externally. Often, we see communication strategies discussed in terms of sales and marketing — but their reach should be much more comprehensive. When done right, an effective communication strategy will help you sell your products and services, respond to crises, and improve efficiency. Here are five reasons to consider upgrading your current communication strategy:

Communication is the backbone of your business.

Communication drives everything you do in your business. This fact applies to the interactions between individuals and teams within your company and external stakeholders.

If people are unable to communicate efficiently, it will impede progress and limit your organization’s growth potential.

This gap is where your communication strategy comes in. To enable your stakeholders to communicate effectively with each other, you must have an appropriate telecommunications system. If you can’t rely on the technology you depend on to facilitate communication, you’ll likely fall at the first hurdle.

Communication improves your relationship with your customers.

The way you interact with your customer’s matters. This is why communication strategies tend to have a strong PR and marketing focus. But an effective communication strategy goes even further.

While it’s important to consider how you will communicate with customers before making a purchase, your communication strategy must also outline how you will interact with them afterward.

This consideration should include an appraisal of the systems of customer communication and support. For example, do you have an appropriate hosted telecommunications system that provides you with all the information you need to provide first-class customer service? According to this year’s State of Customer Experience report, 96 percent of customers believe customer experience is an important factor in determining their loyalty to your brand. This statistic demonstrates one way an effective communication strategy directly influences your bottom line.

Effective communication improves engagement from your employees and partners.

As well as ensuring effective communication with your customers, your communication strategy should also consider how you communicate internally.

Your company depends on its employees to thrive. Therefore, employee engagement directly impacts the success of your business. Your communication strategy should prioritize this, ensuring your internal telecommunication system and procedures support communication inside the organization, as well as externally.

The importance of your internal communication systems also extends to any business partners that work alongside you, such as suppliers or external contractors. Poor internal communication leads to frustration, delays, and lack of employee engagement. An effective communication strategy mitigates these risks.

Effective communication reduces downtime.

Your communication strategy should include a full analysis of your telecommunications system. If you’re experiencing downtime with your current provider, this is a good indicator that it’s time to upgrade your existing systems to reduce the amount of time you’re offline.

You should never underestimate the importance of your telecommunications system. It drives the vast majority of your company’s communication — both internally and externally.

Downtime is expensive for your business, with a recent report suggesting the average cost of an hour’s downtime was between $301,000 and $400,000 in 2019.

If reducing downtime is a priority for your business when upgrading your communication strategy, consider migrating to an SD-WAN solution. This type of system has been found to reduce time offline by as much as 95 percent.

Upgrade communication systems to enhance the scalability of your business.

Finally, you must ensure your telecommunications system can adequately support the future growth of your business. An inadequate communications system will impede your growth and introduce costly projects to upgrade your existing capabilities.

Your communication strategy should prioritize scalability, ensuring that your business’s systems can meet your storage and bandwidth demands.

Do you need some support to upgrade your communication strategy? Get in touch to find out how we can help.