5 communication tips for businesses this National Day

Singapore has made strong progress in 47 years and businesses must know how to keep up.

Avaya, a business solutions provider, gave 5 business tips to achieve greater efficiency and productivity.

Listening to customers through the right channels

With the multifarious modes of communication out there now, consumers have at their disposal many different means of reaching out to a company. In a recent BT-Avaya studyi, it was also shown that 65% of consumers continually change how they contact an organisation. Traditional contact centre solutions which have proved useful in the past are unable to provide a consistent experience for customers across communications channels let alone support the kind of multi-modal, simultaneous voice and multimedia interactions that users are now demanding. There is a need for a change in the architecture to one that is designed from the ground up to support multimedia, multi-modal communications – a solution that is media agnostic and easily able to adapt to new contact types as they emerge.

Manageability that puts people first

The bottleneck for businesses is no longer access to information, but the ability to connect people together with the right information at the right time. With the explosion of devices, tools and communication channels it is essential for organizations to be able to manage and channelize communications in a manner that can help achieve real-time business collaboration in a single user-friendly platform. Desktop and mobile video-enabled devices available today are equipped with real- time office collaboration tools that deliver context-sensitive mash-ups of chat, email, social network and video communications — all tied with a common look and feel regardless of device. Enabling consumer mobile devices with the same business applications employees expect in an office environment is key to driving productivity and employee engagement.

Riding the BYOD wave and making it work for your company

In a 2011 IDC studyii, it was found that 40% of devices that are used to access business applications are personally owned. This BYOD phenomenon, where employees increasingly demand to use their own devices at work, has created some challenges for IT managers. However, there are opportunities that BYOD brings, such as an increase in employee productivity, reduction in the cost and complexity of maintaining large corporate hardware, and the user-friendliness of the devices and applications which
are coming into enterprises from the consumer space. Businesses can equip themselves with a strong Unified Communications (UC) platform solution to accommodate and seamlessly incorporate the myriad of end-user technologies on a common platform, with cost and energy efficiency in mind. A good UC platform will ensure that companies stay connected with their end-users across all different environments, social media or devices effortlessly.

Making security integral to the communications structure

In the face of this overwhelming tide of device proliferation, CIOs can no longer dictate IT policy with regard to the way users access the network. Increasingly, organisations that have what is perceived to be an overly restrictive IT policy, are facing issues of retention and employee satisfaction. Rather than fight it, many organisations are seeking the most effective security and data risk management standards in order to manage personal devices on the company’s network.

Tackling Small Medium Enterprises (SMEs) challenges the smart and cost-efficient way

According to the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation (APEC) forum, 95% of businesses in the Asia-Pacific region are SMEs. They face challenges such as limited access to financing and access to domestic markets. For SMEs to thrive in today’s rapidly changing workforce environment, increasingly driven by BYOD and advanced mobility, it is critical to invest in value-for-money technology that will drive collaboration and productivity. Cloud services and virtualization are two ways in which the playing field
is being leveled for many SMEs. And employing a UC solution that delivers big value with flexibility and scalability, will improve a company’s efficiency internally, as well as with customers. Faster collaboration leads to more informed, faster business decisions, while helping SMEs to reduce costs.