How Small Businesses are Making Affordable Client Communication Techniques Stronger
The old adage about getting what you pay for might actually be obsolete in the current business communications landscape. Smaller organizations and sole proprietorships are finding that low-cost and even free tools are able to keep them in touch with their clients better than some of the most expensive technologies on the market.
A greater investment in the technological infrastructure can often dramatically increase the overall maintenance costs that come with any given workflow. More personnel might also be needed to keep up with the steady stream of updates that would no doubt be part of such a complex arrangement.
As a result, it’s often less expensive to opt for a simpler solution that only provides the exact features that someone needs to talk with every potential sale lead they have. The rising cost of roaming charges and mobile contracts are making it difficult for companies to give everyone on their team a phone. That might be why many are returning to traditional packetized voice services.
The Benefits of Commercial Phone Services
With so much of the world being pushed toward mobile technology, you might think that there’s no room for actual landlines. Engineers have been working hard to develop inexpensive landline services that are actually competitive with cellular networks.
These are often less expensive than mobile phones and offer more features on top of it. Unlike the touch-tone desk phones you might be used to, these sophisticated solutions integrate full-screen visual display technology right into their handsets.
Best of all, modern business phone service contracts offer everything that mobile ones would. Managers can get access to SMS texts, message boxes, and even voicemail transcription. These leverage traditional connections to a telephone company central office or an existing Internet connection. Either method is reliable and might even work when mobile towers go down.
Small business owners who are serious about keeping tabs on all of their clients can connect their business line with a customer relationship management application. Those who need to send out a large number of calls automatically can rely on this kind of technology to reduce their workload. This might sometimes enable tiny companies to stay competitive with larger firms that employ a massive marketing staff.
Perhaps the most important feature of a business phone system is its ability to block spam calls more effectively than pretty much anything else on the market. High-tech scams cost around $8.8 billion in the last year. Small business owners can easily be wiped out by a targeted financial scam, so an inexpensive way to reduce this risk is certainly valuable.
Companies that can lower their call volume will also have more time to communicate with the clients that mean the most to them, which is why some business owners are taking a philosophical approach to the way they manage their communications.
Cutting Down on Telecommunications Chaff
By emphasizing strategies instead of new apps and devices, administrators have been able to slash costs while getting rid of all the unnecessary information thrown at their teams daily. Network carriers often offer voicemail transcription services and the ability to manage customer messages through a display terminal.
Spending a few minutes each day with these simple solutions can help dramatically reduce the amount of unwanted information a sales representative would have to wade through when looking for their next lead. The same thinking goes for email as well.
Enthusiastic supporters of a management strategy known as inbox zero have long promoted the idea of doing everything you can. This is to ensure that you focus on only the most important messages whenever you sit down to look through what clients might have sent you.
Deleting promotional messages from other organizations is an excellent start. This literally costs nothing and ensures that potential buyers never get some error message about a full inbox. Tech-savvy project managers will often use a separate free email account for client communication.
These marketing specialists won’t get distracted by unimportant messages by specifying a single address that never gets associated with newsletters or other mass mailings. Even the most basic free email services come with some form of spam filter and address book. And again, it costs literally nothing to start using these features. Consider the fact that a whopping 31% of digital business professionals say they get too much email. You’ll quickly see why these techniques are so effective.
All of this same wisdom applies to social media outlets as well.
Managing Social Network Accounts for Less
No other type of advertising is as cost-effective as social media since it’s basically free, to begin with. Most people shouldn’t have to spend anything to get up and running with it, though some online verification processes do cost money. However, assuming you can make content in-house, you shouldn’t run into many more expenses than this.
Comment moderation is one area where small business owners do end up incurring additional costs. There’s a risk of people posting obscene responses whenever a brand starts to get popular. Companies that suffer from this problem might bring in several content specialists. Then they must manage each firm’s social networking account separately. Investing in a solution is a much more cost-efficient way of tackling the problem. This way, it let you manage all social media in one place from a single dashboard.
Marketing experts have long extolled the virtues of this kind of management from a communications standpoint as well. By making it easy to see every reply sent to each account all at once, sales representatives know right away who they need to write to. This is especially useful for those planning to manage accounts on more than five or six different services.
Regardless of which solution a business goes with, it’s important to keep their budget in mind.
Avoiding Communication Cost Overruns
Information service specialists who take the time to audit the tools they currently have will generally spend the least on upgrades when it comes time to improve the way they contact potential leads. Strategies will often start with a list of the new solutions they need most. And then, they will see whether or not it meets the budgetary constraints they already have in place.
Chances are that some of these solutions offer more than enough features to take the place of several different applications. Putting some effort into this kind of planning now can help to save a substantial amount of time. This is true, especially when the messages start pouring in.
