The Essential Elements of Advanced Business Communications

Workers across virtually every industry are spending more time on digital communication tools—and this is good news. Workers can generate a lot of business value by instant messaging to solve complex problems, scheduling web conferences with prospective clients, and automatically generating reports of customer interactions through online portals.

In today’s professional contexts, workers spend at least 20 hours a week on digital tools. When they can easily collaborate, share information, confirm details, and push projects toward the finish line, everyone wins, and the right advanced business communications systems are critical to success.

On the flip side, investing in the wrong tools can disrupt your team. With the wrong systems in place, your teams are at a heightened risk of burnout (60%), and productivity can decrease. To get the best value out of business communication tools, every company should assess the tools it really needs, create processes that mitigate burnout and distraction, and continually look to the future for potential innovations and improvements.

What Is Advanced Business Communications?

No matter the industry, business operations rely heavily on communication, but conventional tools and systems simply aren’t up to the task. Depending on where employees are working, they can lead to delays, misunderstandings, gaps in information, and limited access to resources. 

These limitations don’t just increase the workload and time spent by your internal staff. They can impact employee engagement and customer experiences, leading to extra noise that drowns out the value of your organization’s products and services. 

Advanced business communications harness modern technology to eliminate common communication problems that organizations face. In addition to the tools, it’s important to examine all the elements of business communication your company employs and match them with the right solutions to streamline and optimize them. Consider the following types of communication businesses often engage in.

• Upward communication, or the modes employees can use to ask questions, provide feedback, and direct details to personnel in higher management roles
• Downward communication, or systems that assist leaders in communicating consistent information to large groups or teams of workers
• Lateral communication, such as messages about meetings, tasks, projects, and work changes
• External communication, including leaders’ communications with stakeholders, revenue teams’ communications with customers, and interactions between the brand and consumers

Decision makers develop advanced business communication strategies, such as detailed playbooks and norms for each of these branches. Resources include style guides, how-to videos, templates, and tactical guidelines for devising new communications. As part of creating strategies and documents, both SMBs and larger enterprises benefit from evaluating their current selection of business tools and choosing ones that facilitate all types of communication.

Unified Communications: The Future of Business Communications

One of the biggest struggles many businesses face when adopting cutting-edge communication tools is that each software is an entirely separate system. What your team discusses within internal communication platforms likely won’t show up on customer account profiles. 

Likewise, new details shared over email might not appear when a phone representative is searching for the latest customer updates during a live call. You might still be using analog or legacy phone systems rather than digital software. Dozens of small gaps, barriers, and invisible problems prohibit your communications from interacting smoothly with one another.

Unified Communications (UC) is a broad term that encompasses the major types of real-time business communication, such as chat, data sharing, video calls, and more, as well as other channels like email. When all of these channels originate from a single unified ecosystem, most of those gaps and barriers are resolved. 

For example, an employee can search for a client account and get details across chats, emails, and previous phone calls from one portal, and they can manage all of their communications from one secure system. Three major aspects of Unified Communications are voice calling, web conferencing, and messaging.

Voice Calling

Voice communication solutions have transformed over the past several years. Rather than maintaining hard phone lines, many modern businesses have switched to VoIP ( Voice over Internet Protocol) options. VoIP solutions, which can use phones and computer programs, transmit voice communications over the internet. SIP Connectivity is a crucial component of VoIP, providing a standardized way to establish, manage, and terminate multimedia communication sessions, including voice calls.

Users can work in the office, in their homes, or while traveling because their access to the business voice system digitally travels with them on any device. This is particularly ideal for remote workers and companies with mobile employees who need flexibility. It’s also ideal for companies that work entirely within a set office space, as each employee’s digital phone line is clearly identifiable. Calls can be recorded and added to customer files, audited for compliance, translated into text files, and easily searched when employees need details from a past call.

Web Conferencing

Web conferencing has become more critical for businesses than ever before. Some key use cases of web conferencing include:

• Remote team meetings and project sessions
• One-on-one meetings between managers and remote staff (or staff in another office)
• All-hands calls and big presentations
• Client demos and meetings
• Training sessions

Hybrid work environments require digital face-to-face interactions for internal and external communications—and even traditional work environments benefit from the option. UC-style web conferencing is secure, makes it easier to set meetings and share resources, and ensures users can reaccess recorded meetings to gather relevant information. This means web conferences can be used as more than one-time touchpoints. You can also create libraries for continual use of past meetings, presentations, and trainings.

Messaging

Companies require multiple messaging channels. These include internal instant messaging channels, workflow and work-processing tools, and web conferencing messages. Email and SMS are also essential communication channels. 

These formal and informal communication avenues facilitate far more interactions than when you only adopt email and voice calls. Through a unified approach, employees can reference and search all messaging channels for details, so communications never get lost.

Messaging management is another essential aspect of external communications. Today’s consumers expect SMS, email, 24/7 chat (including chatbots), and instant messaging through dedicated channels (for your key accounts). Administrating, controlling, and saving these platforms strengthens your company.

Benefits of Upgrading Your Businesses Communications

Every company needs some combination of secure, intuitive, and connected communication tools. Proactively evaluating different implementations of advanced business communications will help enhance your performance, whether your current objectives focus on internal interactions or you’re assessing improvements for customer engagement and satisfaction. 

Any new adoption will require buy-in from stakeholders across the company. This might include IT staff that will handle the day-to-day details, department heads that will need to shift employees to new tools, and leadership teams that approve the cost. Weighing the business-critical benefits that advanced business communications provide can help you present them to the decision-makers.

A Progression of Your Cloud-Based Business Maturity

Shifting operations to the cloud protects your business. You can safely and securely store and retrieve data as needed, and you can reduce costly on-site storage or servers. Unified Communications exists on the cloud to provide global reach to your staff, business partners, and consumers. Not only does it directly strengthen your business operations, but it may also align with preexisting IT strategy objectives.

Seamless Client Experience Throughout the Pipeline

Conventional methods of arranging workflows and communication create a jarring experience for customers. They shift from one siloed stage to the next, interacting with various teams and encountering different messaging every step of the way. 

This disjointed approach is bad for businesses—it’s even worse when customers have to repeat conversations only to encounter the same problems. With UC, each member of your team can pick up where the previous one left off.

Easier Information Gathering and Usage

Because all of your communications will occur through digital pathways, they can be stored as easy-to-search files. Attach them to your knowledge base, CRM, or general business drives so employees can find customer details, updates, or real-time changes in business processes without having to waste time looking.

Greater Equality Among In-Office and Remote Staff

While hybrid work environments are becoming more popular, they still have significant hurdles preventing many businesses from adopting them. One of the biggest challenges is that in-office staff and remote staff don’t always have access to the same information or channels.

After all, in-office staff can chat, attend face-to-face meetings, and receive in-person clarification. But when your internal digital channels become more convenient and robust, remote employees can be just as active and participatory as everyone else. They’re also less likely to feel left out of the loop or isolated.

Better Scalability

Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) solutions provide the scalability and flexibility that growing enterprises need to support their evolving communication requirements. As businesses expand, UCaaS systems can seamlessly adapt to accommodate the increasing demands of a growing workforce. 

These cloud-based platforms offer a range of options, from comprehensive all-in-one packages for small and medium-sized businesses to highly customizable solutions for enterprises with more complex needs. 

By consolidating communication channels into a unified system like UCaaS, organizations can eliminate the drain on resources caused by old technology, unused licenses, and the need for large upfront cash outlays and dedicated teams to manage installation and maintenance. UCaaS allows businesses to pay only for what they need, providing predictable month-to-month costs and freeing them from the ongoing expenses of service contracts for onsite PBXs. 

With the UCaaS provider handling upgrades, maintenance, and troubleshooting, companies can save significant money and time while easily scaling their infrastructure to meet the ever-changing demands of their expanding operations, ensuring they are well-positioned to future-proof their communication strategies.

Managed Connectivity for Fewer Disruptions

Maintaining a robust, secure, and efficient network is both essential and challenging for businesses. Managed connectivity services ensure that critical communication networks remain in optimal health by overseeing all the details, allowing businesses to focus on other strategic priorities. 

The right providers offer proactive monitoring and restoration services, a unified point of contact, and industry expertise—at customized service levels tailored to your specific business and its technical requirements.

Choose the Right Unified Communications Platform for Your Business’s Advanced Communications

Advanced business communications are quickly becoming an everyday part of business, and businesses are spending more time using digital tools. Preparing your organization for this increased focus on communications requires an investment in the right tools and systems. At BCM One, we offer different UC options, SIP Trunking, Managed SIP Trunking, UCaaS and Global Enterprise Voice Solutions, each offering next-level, high-quality support. Contact us today to find the right solutions for your current and future business communication needs.