Automation of business communication processes can increase efficiency and add to your bottom line.

Managing resource and costs are two of the most important aspects of running a small business. Often small businesses run on a limited budget and have a certain resource capacity.

It is therefore very important that both the costs and resources are utilised efficiently to get the best results for the business. This, however, is a very challenging goal to reach.

Many SMEs tend to have a very flat hierarchy and a hands-on approach to all their business processes including the way they communicate with customers and partners and share information amongst themselves.

Everyone does their bit to help with all aspects of the business from faxing through to printing through to sending out mass emails.

This is the nature of small businesses and in many cases this is done as a practical solution to meet its needs. This can be a very time consuming, however, and costly way to run a business.

If you calculate all the time taken manually faxing clients, sending out customer newsletters or even waiting for feedback or decisions from colleagues or partners in different offices,  this is time taken away from you actually getting your job done and growing your business.

Collaborative working 

Whilst it is great that there is a flat hierarchy and everyone helps out regardless of their position, ultimately it is affecting your efficiency and costing you time and money.

So what can be done to resolve this? Whilst there are some processes that need to be done manually there are plenty of processes that can be automated and sped up through the use of technology; such as faxing, mass customer communications and collaborative working.

In addition, the automation of these processes does not mean having to purchase expensive software or change anything on your existing network.

There are now services available that use a web based user interface that allows companies to take advantage of these communication technologies. Users can literally just go on to a secure web page and use the applications.

In addition, they are only charged for the services that they use. As these services are on-demand there is no additional subscription cost.

The real benefit to businesses, however, comes in the time saved. Let’s be clear: automation of communication business process does not remove the need for human management.

Automated on-demand technology 

What it does is speed up the process. One example is being able to send and receive faxes directly from your desktop instead of having to manually tap in a number and stand around and wait for a confirmation.

Another key example is in collaborative working. If you are working on a document, contract or proposal with someone in a different location it is often the case that it travels backwards and forward several times before it is finalised.

Why not use a web conference to improve the efficiency of working together on the document to get it finalised and finished? This saves you a huge amount of time and effort in the process.

As well as internal processes, automated on-demand technology can also help if you wanted to send out a mass communication to you customer base.

Through the automation of this process you are able to simply send out a simultaneous email, fax and SMS from your desk top, with one click of your mouse.

Through the automation of these processes SME owners and employees will be able to free up much valuable time and resource to help them grow their business.

Focus on growing the business 

In addition, these automated business communication processes will help them effectively interact with their customers, realising increased sales.

Automating proactive customer interaction such as newsletters and updates, alerting them to new products and services or even chasing outstanding debtors will save companies time and money.

This freed up resource can then be focussed on growing the business, developing new services or even taking a holiday.

In addition, there is the ability to save time and money travelling to meetings through use of web and audio conferencing to discuss issues, be trained on a new product or even carry out a review.

I believe that technology should be used to make our lives simpler and not add unnecessary time consuming complexities.

That is why I believe in the automation of processes that improve the efficiencies of businesses without disrupting them in the process.

All companies need to communicate and share information and through the use of automated communication solutions companies can reap the benefits by freeing up valuable time and resource to concentrate on running a successful business – ultimately adding directly to the bottom line.

Simon Bushell is vice president Sales Western Europe at Premiere Global Services.

Share this: digg   del.ico.us   Newsvine   Reddit   Furl   technorati   Facebook

Comments (0)

Subscribe to this comment's feed

Name (required)

Email (required) (not published)

Website

Title

POST

By posting on this website you are agreeing to abide by our website comment policy and all posts are subject to the approval of the website editor. We will remove posts that contain offensive or threatening language, personal attacks on the writer or other posters, posts that are off topic and posts that are considered spam or specifically used to promote any commercial products or services. Any poster who repeatedly contravenes the policy will be banned from posting on the website.