Sorry for the loaded title. There’s a lot to talk about, even for those of you who don’t use or even know what Telegram is.

We’ll try to sum this up, because we think there is a lot to say about security and the nature of technology in this, and like all things these days, there’s some odd rabble-rousing about this whole series of events. Who’s up for a wild ride?

Streamlining communications for small businesses can significantly boost efficiency and elevate overall performance. However, achieving this isn’t as simple as just deciding to implement it. This month, we’ll explore some key advantages that a unified communications platform can offer.

Collaboration is at the heart of any effective business. Most organizations today are trying to make the most of their limited resources, and one of the ways to do this is with a solid collaboration strategy. Here’s how you can do the same to avoid siloing tasks and squandering your workforce’s potential.

When it comes to running a successful business, customer confidence is everything. It can make or break your business’ reputation. If you’re too reckless with your customers, why would anyone else be willing to sign on with you? Thankfully, there are plenty of ways you can build customer confidence, and technology plays a pivotal role in many of them. Today, we want to explore how you can build customer confidence through the use of business technology solutions.

Effective teamwork is indispensable for business success. Collaboration stands out as an extremely important consideration, yet devising a strategy that expedites project completion and enhances service delivery poses challenges. This week, we get into modern collaboration practices and how technology can help you improve collaboration.

We’ve seen the conference rooms of a lot of businesses, from the modified break-room with stale coffee to immaculate lecture rooms with plush, comfy seats, and everything in between.

A good conference room can do a lot to impress potential clients and customers, encourage collaboration within your team, and leave a great impression on potential employees too. While we’re not going to pretend to be interior decorators, there are definitely some important steps that we can assist with to make sure your conference room is up to the task.

Effective communication often operates behind the scenes, yet it serves as a vital cog in the smooth operational ability of business, lending support to a multitude of functions. Consequently, making judicious investments in the right tools can markedly elevate your business. In the contemporary landscape, one such indispensable tool is Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP).

Collaboration tools can be remarkably helpful for businesses, if not downright essential to their success. With the right tools that are, of course, configured the right way, you can see exponential returns on your investment as your staff enjoy the many benefits they provide. Today, we want to discuss four common pitfalls with your collaboration tool security that must be addressed.

Innovation is important to businesses because there are advancements in technologies and strategies that are made all the time that help to improve these businesses’ processes. Although there are several niche business communication strategies to consider—which may apply to your business—we’ve listed the top five universal strategies that all businesses should regard as critical:

Technology is only effective in the hands of the right—or, at least, well-trained—employees. To work toward this goal, you’ll have to ramp up your hiring processes to ensure you garner the interest of the right candidates for the jobs. Nowhere is this more true than for your IT department. Let’s go over how you can make your business an attractive employment option for skilled and innovative technicians.

Communication is a key part of doing business. Today, there are a variety of solutions devoted to improving your business’ communications strategy in some way, shape, or form. Here, we’ll go over the communications tools that businesses use today, and discuss why today’s business should be invested in most or all of them.

What is VoIP?

At first glance, VoIP is almost indistinguishable from the telephone services you are used to using—in fact, you’ve likely used it before.

Business Doesn’t Stop, But You Should

We’ve all been there. We’re driving or on the train and a phone call comes in that you absolutely have to take. What do you do? Most people will take the call, but the right thing to do is send it to voicemail and return the call as soon as possible. Why? Because you are distracted. It’s best to call back and give the caller the attention they deserve rather than trying to juggle a phone call in the middle of traffic. Okay, this one is pretty basic, but it’s the foundation of all mobile etiquettes.

What is VoIP, Anyways?

Voice over Internet Protocol is simply a different, more cost-effective means of transmitting voice data from one telephonic device to another. Rather than using a telephone provider’s infrastructure, a VoIP signal utilizes the Internet. This eliminates an entire line item from your expenses by rendering your telephone provider’s services redundant. This enables you to simultaneously save money while enjoying many often-included features that would otherwise have cost extra—assuming that they were even available with traditional telephony.

There are multiple add-ons and browser extensions available to help boost your email templates with more dynamic options, but today, we’ll be focusing on the baked-in capabilities that Gmail comes with.

1.  Use the Best Tool for the Job

Your contacts should never find it difficult to reach you, so you need to make sure you’re providing them with plenty of options for them to make contact. Don’t pick between a phone number or an email address, give them both, along with a live chat feature, conferencing options, and other forms of communication. Making use of things like a blog and social media give you a great way to reach out to them first, starting the conversation.

To start, let’s consider the situation that we find ourselves in.

With COVID-19 still spreading, the general consensus is that spending time around other people is currently a bad thing, making the workplace a less-than-ideal environment in which to spend one’s time. As a result, many people have self-quarantined themselves in their homes. With today’s available technology, however, this does not mean that they cannot get work done, with the cloud offering great opportunities for collaboration and remote work. This plays into VoIP’s benefits quite nicely.

Let’s start by examining the reasons for communications that businesses use to manage their internal processes.

• Information sharing - There is plenty of news that needs to make its way around any business. There are many different forms of communication that can accomplish this. 
• Collaboration - Today’s business needs to use collaborative strategies more than businesses of the past, and communication is a big part of any collaborative endeavor.

Now, let’s consider a few solutions that can help you to accomplish solid information sharing and collaboration.

Information Sharing

When you think of internal communications at work, the lion’s share of it will fill this need. Employees need to know certain things to maintain continuity of a business. This includes the publication of policies, procedures, plans, or potential changes to each. To accommodate the sharing of all this knowledge, businesses use the following tools: 

• Email - Email is the most tried-and-true solution for internal business communications because it works on every level. It is available, familiar, and with today’s email platforms, features dynamic tools that can help anyone get their point across. 
• Newsletters - Some companies choose to roll out a company newsletter for their staff. In these newsletters there are spotlights on points of emphasis. If you choose the newsletter as the tool you want to broadcast your internal communications, however, it has to be understood. 

Collaboration

Nowadays, collaboration is important for every business’ success. Business moves faster and if you don’t have some semblance of coordination between your employees in separate departments, it can cost more than time. It can be the difference between generating revenue and not. Here are some tools used to boost collaboration:

• Productivity Suites - Today, there are a lot of collaboration-based applications out there. They are designed for specific business needs, but the most effective are the productivity suites like Google’s G Suite and Microsoft Office 365 because they give you the collaborative tools and shared storage that any team needs to be successful.
• Chat Applications and Forums - Instant messaging apps have improved collaborations tenfold. Forums have been useful since the early days of the Internet. Today, developers have created apps that combine the two and offer hundreds of outside software integrations to help promote collaboration.

The IT professionals at Coleman Technologies have the expertise and access to solutions to help you solve any of your business’ operational problems. Call us today at (604) 513-9428 to learn more.

Why Effective Communications are So Critical

There are a few reasons that you want your business’ internal communications to be clear and effective.

Fewer Errors

Miscommunication is rarely a good thing, but in the business setting, it has the potential to be crippling to your operations. If the correct information isn’t shared at the right time, with the right people, productivity will suffer. On the other hand, proper communications can help minimize, or even avoid, many potential workplace errors.

Increased Accountability

When an organization keeps its communications open across the board, it is prone to see an associated increase in companywide accountability. From owner to intern, being responsible for (and being held responsible for) certain milestones in a process keeps each member of a team on-task and motivated.

Improved Teamwork

Naturally, when members of a team communicate properly, they are better able to work cooperatively. As a result, problems often become easier to solve, as ideas may more easily flow and develop. Additionally, potential issues between departments are more easily resolved, preventing interpersonal concerns from affecting the work.

Efficient Problem-Solving

The ability to communicate clearly enables a team to better pool their talents to much more efficiently overcome any issues that may arise. Whether a problem is strategic or technical, having the capability to swiftly solve it will only benefit a business’ operations.

Instant Messaging in the Workplace

Naturally, all of the above outcomes can (and often do) result from the use of an instant messaging application… as long as it’s the right one.

You need to make sure that your chosen solution is intended for business purposes, which means you need to use an enterprise-grade instant messaging application. In addition, you also need to be sure that you and your staff are properly leveraging your solution. Try to encourage the following practices and behaviors in your staff to ensure that your instant messaging solution doesn’t turn into an instant messaging problem:

• Keep it in check. You don’t want a solution that is meant to be a productivity booster to actually harm it. There’s a very real difference between your staff properly leveraging instant messaging capabilities, and aimlessly chatting all day. Encourage your staff to keep their conversations pertinent to the workplace and the task at hand (at least as much as possible).
• Remain professional. Again, conversations on your instant message solution should be far and away focused on workplace matters. It is important that your staff knows this, and resists using the solution to share jokes, GIFs, or memes excessively. Moderation is key.
• Don’t rely too much on it. Not all conversations are appropriate for an instant messaging platform, especially those that contain sensitive or overly complicated details. Some conversations are better shared in person, or in an email, where lengthier messages can be sent.

Have you ever utilized instant messaging in the workplace? Share your experience with us in the comments!

Team Building Benefits

Many modern businesses have employees who don’t always work in the office, instead electing to operate remotely. However, it is important that these employees are still assimilated as a part of your team as a whole. A conferencing solution can allow you to keep your remote employees on the same page as your on-site employees, building camaraderie between coworkers despite any distance between them. The better your team is able to collaborate, the more effective they will be able to be in accomplishing their tasks, as they will have each other as a resource to lean on as needed.

Keep Your Team On-Task

Let’s face it, it can sometimes be hard to be sure that your employees are focused on the task at hand. This is especially true when you can only hear their voice, or see the responses they send back to you. A conferencing solution fixes this difficulty by giving you and your team a visual of each other, keeping everyone involved accountable and engaged.

Increase Your Collaborative Footprint

It wasn’t all that long ago that collaborating with someone a distance away was only possible over the phone or by physically traveling to meet with them. However, collaborative conferencing solutions have taken this distance and shrank it down to effectively nothing. Like the team building benefits we discussed earlier, your team is no longer restricted to one place, or to dealing with exclusively local coworkers, partners, and other resources.

Promote “Face-to-Face” Communication

A sizable portion of communication is non-verbal, which means that your solution needs to account for this balance. More traditional solutions didn’t take this into consideration - or rather, couldn’t. Modern collaboration solutions, on the other hand, allow you to communicate more completely by allowing you to witness these non-verbal cues. 

Conferencing Can Simplify Your Solution Set

Compared to legacy solutions, modern conferencing tools offer a much more comprehensive selection of features. As a result, you can reduce the number of solutions that your operations rely upon, cutting expenses and streamlining your processes. This makes it much easier to find success in communicating with your team, without sinking all of your capital into your solutions.

Coleman Technologies can assist you in establishing the collaboration solution that fits your needs, as well as any other IT implementation your business requires. Learn more by calling (604) 513-9428.