When it comes to investing in new company-wide software, businesses are often tentative as they don’t want to waste money on useless resources. This is completely the right attitude to take, and before upgrading or developing any new means of communication, it is wise to first do your homework and see if it will benefit the business.
To help you decide and to really understand your decision, here are five surprising ways in which internal communication software can save your business money.
1. Connects globally dispersed teams
The modern world of business means that a company often has multiple different teams working at different locations around the globe. Communication can be timely and costly whilst trying to communicate via multiple different methods; be those methods digital or physical, which in itself is extremely expensive and timely.
However, with one consistent central communication system, teams can communicate quickly and stay up to date with developments made by associates elsewhere around the world. This directly and indirectly saves your company lots of money via more productive staff.
2. It forgoes costly errors
Naturally, when people are trying to speak with each other from many different locations and via different forms of communication, mistakes will be made.
This can be via small errors and occasionally bigger ones which can be extremely timely and costly to resolve, such as making a large unnecessary duplicate purchase. Again, with one central communication software, it’s easier to track everyone’s updates and forgo these costly errors.
3. It helps retain great talent
One of the most costly things to any business is recruiting and training highly skilled staff. This means that once you attract great talent, you want to retain it and help stop them jumping to another seemingly better company. A great communication strategy and internal communications tools can benefit this in a number of ways:
4. It speeds up the customer service process
Any great company will be made up of a number of different departments who are each integral to dealing with certain aspects of customer experience. This involves the marketing team who promotes and advertises the offers and schemes, the sales team who directly interact and promise features to customers, and then, of course, the after-sales team who manage any issues or upgrades.
Naturally, there is a lot of information that fails to get passed between these teams, especially when not every customer is the same. When problems do occur and when it comes to dealing with any issues, your company needs to ensure it can quickly and effectively communicate the problem between themselves and come to a solution that quickly appeases the customer.
Effective internal communication software creates a space where these teams can interact with each other effectively and together resolve these issues and avoid losing out on customers.
5. It cuts the cost of gathering information
This point links to a number of the above but it’s important it is recognised as it’s arguably the most valuable cost-saving benefit. Gathering information relates not just to helping to deal with customer service issues, but also to all other areas of the company.
This can involve helping leadership and management making the most informed decisions about potential deals or developments of the product. Different research suggests that as much as 20% of employee time is spent gathering information for their daily tasks.
Good internal communication allows employees to search through old threads and discussion topics, as well as to ask and quickly get answers to immediate concerns.
Hopefully, from this, you now have a better understanding of what internal communication software is and how it can deliver surprisingly impressive results in many different ways. Greater efficiency and better margins are important for every business, so it may well be time for you to upgrade your intranet software as a means to access these benefits.