Business Communications Are Changing Rapidly

Communication solutions for business are changing rapidly, and most of the new solutions go a long way toward using existing technologies that allow these organizations to save money and get more for the services they already pay for.

There are five major business communications tools on the market today, they are:

• Telephone
• Email
• Conferencing
• Instant messaging
• Team collaboration apps

We’ll take a brief look at each to see how they’ve been innovated (or invented) to help businesses like yours build profitability.

Telephone
The telephone, as with any other transcendent technology, has had business grow up merely because of its presence. Of course, around dinner time, those businesses just happen to be the most annoying businesses in the world, but all-in-all they’ve been around for a long, long time so if the brilliance of the technology has dimmed a bit, it still is admittedly necessary for almost every modern business.

For decades, telephone service was dominated by the telephone company; and, while they still exist, many people now get their phone service through their cable provider. For the modern business who needs telephone service with certain options, and who doesn’t need cable, the cable-provided telephone service can get costly fast.

VoIP, or voice over Internet protocol, is an enterprise telephone service that uses your organization's existing bandwidth to place and accept calls, and comes with a lot of the features any company would need, for a fraction of the price they would have traditionally paid. There are all types of VoIP plans and services out there. If you would like to save money, while getting the reliable telephone services you are used to, the friendly consultants at Directive can help you find the VoIP plan that fits your organization's needs.

Email
Again, email is a technology that almost everyone will be accustomed to using. For the average office worker or salesperson, their email is a constant source of information. A person’s email address is used by most organizations to set up accounts, correspond, and integrate with line of business applications like customer resource management (CRM) software to push notifications in a central area, so workers don’t miss anything.

Today’s email platform is more intuitive and service-laden than in the past. While email is extraordinarily useful, it can be very time consuming, and is the predominant way many organizations get infiltrated by hackers. As phishing schemes get more sophisticated, more people fall into hackers’ socially-engineered traps.

The integrations are email’s biggest superlative feature. Many pieces of productivity software integrate with many separate types of email. In doing so, a worker’s email can provide them with a lot of the information they receive without having to depend on multiple applications to do so.

Conferencing
With more collaborative work going on, and with more technology available to fuel remote connectivity, having virtual meetings has become an important part of many organizations’ communications strategies. Today there are several strong conferencing options that include the ability to share information via screen swapping, video presentation, or face-to-face communication. New conferencing technology moves your meetings out of the boardroom and into the chatroom.

Many times the conferencing software you need either comes with, or successfully integrates with a VoIP solution. Again, our consultants can assess your needs in order to develop a communications strategy that works for your entire company, remote workers and all.

Instant Messaging
By now, everyone that uses social media knows all about the ease of instant messaging (IM). Instant messaging allows your team to communicate with minimal distraction. Nowadays, most business application have some sort of chat program, whether that be a forum-based interface or a direct one-on-one chat interface.

One problem that businesses have with IM is that they are typically part of another program (e.g. Facebook Messenger) and could present significant distractions for workers. Most of these platforms offer a “for business” product, but finding the ones with the security, reporting, and media-sharing features that is commensurate with your organization's needs could be difficult. The consultants at Directive can help place you alongside the platform that will work for your organization's needs.

Team Collaboration Apps
In what seems to be the next step for business communications, the team collaboration app has become a major player for project management. The two major titles on the market at present, Slack and Microsoft Teams, provide users with an interface that is much like that of the modern email, with all email’s capabilities, but real-time messaging, and integrations with many third-party applications. Set up like a forum, any person on a team can start conversations with whomever they choose and from there, they can drag and drop information crucial to their shared project’s success.

By creating an interface that takes the best parts of all network collaboration tools, team collaboration app developers have successfully innovated the market for team collaboration and project management. If you are interested in getting to know more about these team collaboration applications, contact us and we’ll tell you what application will be right for you.

Being able to properly innovate to be the best business you can be, can be tough. Call the IT professionals at Directive today at 607.433.2200 to start taking your organization’s communications to the next level.