3 Steps To Find the Right Communications Solution For Your Organization

Organizations are facing a new era that is both exciting and daunting. As many employees have returned to the office in some capacity, some want to keep working remotely. Meanwhile, businesses are also seeing a resurgence in in-person consumer activities in travel, large gatherings, and entertainment venues. Will the pendulum return to pre-2020 behaviors where everyone does business in person? That’s unlikely. Consumer and employee expectations have increased — they want a choice between digital experiences and in-person experiences, when and where they want them.

Unsurprisingly, organizations struggle with running their business when the rules of work change significantly. No one-size-fits-all operational playbook enables this flexibility because every business is different, and every organization is redefining its operational new normal. There are many moving parts to consider for all.

Business communications solutions can make or break an organization’s success in executing its new normal. But organizations need communications solutions that serve the way they do business, not the other way around. Because no two companies are the same, their communications requirements won’t be the same. How can you know if your communications platform is the right fit for your new normal?

Mitel has 50 years of experience helping customers find the right communications solutions. We’ve created a quick, 3-step process to help you re-evaluate your needs and recognize triggers for architecture choices that will be critical to your success.

Step 1: Identify the ‘Must-have’ Elements of Your Customer Experience

Successful organizations are customer driven, so start by taking an inventory of your customers’ expectations. This will dictate what communications capabilities you’ll require to meet them: 

• Do customers expect immediate, continuous access to high-quality, personalized service?
• Do they prefer in-person access to your staff when obtaining guidance or services?
• Do they have time-sensitive or complex service requirements which typically require support from multiple team members to resolve?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, you run a service-driven business where speed, personalization, and quality must be woven into your multi-faceted business communications portfolio. Your ability to efficiently link customers and employees across that portfolio will directly impact your ability to deliver an exceptional customer experience.

For instance, your receptionist’s phone must act as a real-time presence hub for customers who prefer one-on-one meetings, ensuring the right employee is notified, and the customer is met promptly. To ensure timely, personalized resolution of a customer’s problem, your contact center must be integrated with your CRM and presence solutions so an agent can efficiently identify the customer’s need and forward the call to the employee who can best resolve it. And because the service clock is always ticking, you’ll need sophisticated call control solutions that empower any employee to reach another instantly — wherever they’re located — in a way that’s efficient and delivers an exceptional customer experience. 

How Mitel can help: Whatever the size or the nature of your business, Mitel’s comprehensive communications portfolio provides the capabilities you need to optimize your customer experience. Mitel’s business is Unified Communications, so we not only specialize in delivering leading business phone, contact center, and collaboration solutions, we design them to work seamlessly together. Customer experience is the winner.  

Step 2: Examine How Your Employees Get Work Done

Many organizations focus on finding the right balance between remote and on-site work. But supporting where they work is only part of the employee experience equation. To also optimize how they work, consider the following:

• What employees deliver your core value: knowledge, service, or information workers, or do you have a mix?
• Does the value your organization delivers hinge on effective employee collaboration?
• Do certain team members always need to be accessible? Do they move around to work effectively?

Employees with different roles typically have varying communication needs. Knowledge workers tend to use collaboration tools on their laptops. Because information and service workers are often on the move, they may depend more on mobile DECT phones or messaging apps. Businesses with a single-employee type will have more specific collaboration solution requirements. Organizations with a blend of knowledge, information, and service workers need to provide a comprehensive communications foundation that allows their distributed workforce to communicate clearly through the mechanisms they use most frequently.

How Mitel can help: Mitel offers leading collaboration solutions to empower every employee. Whether they’re knowledge, information, or service workers, Mitel lets employees interact seamlessly via a single company solution and directory. Mitel’s world-class communications solutions feature a high-definition, rich telephony foundation that supports the full suite of collaboration applications that a company with a diverse workforce need — including MiContact Center Business, MiCollab text and chat, and MiTeam Meetings video conferencing — across a broad range of mobile devices. Employees can choose the best tool for them and always get an exceptional experience.

Step 3: Evaluate How Your Organization Operates Today and Will in the Future

Understanding what makes your customers and employees tick will tell you what business communications solutions you need. Understanding your operational landscape, core competencies, goals, and constraints will tell you how you need to deploy them.

Communications vendors will often want to stop the discussion at question 2. They want to restrict the conversation to the capabilities they offer and talk about products. But a critical part of communications ‘fit’ is how well those solutions facilitate the way your specific business does business. So, to complete this all-important step, take an inventory of these three categories:

Your operational landscape:

• Where do you do business? Where are your customers and offices located? Do any locations need to ensure always-on service delivery? 
• What type of office structure do you have: Single headquarters? Campus? Branch network? Global operations?
• What departments or locations must comply with industry or government regulations? Do these regulations dictate how work must be done or where customer data must be stored to comply with data security or privacy laws?

Your business goals:

• What is the essence of your business? What are the core competencies you must deliver?
• How can communications help drive business productivity or reduce IT costs to feed productivity investments?

Your technology and budget constraints:

• Do you consider the budget spent on communications software a cost or an investment? 
• Are you looking to drive architecture efficiencies by aligning communications deployment operations and costs with other business applications?
• Do you have the staff to manage and maintain your system, or do you prefer a hands-off model?
• Are you constrained to an annual OpEx budget, or do you have fixed-time-bound CapEx constraints?

Your answers to these questions will create the big picture you need to make the right communications choices that fit your business, and IT needs. Be cautious, as some solutions providers may try to convince you to decide on alternative directions to work around your big picture. 

For example, a cloud-based communications solution might offer the right customer and employee communication and collaboration capabilities. But its cloud-based data center architecture may be inconsistent with your security, integrity, geographic regulatory compliance, or local site survivability requirements. 

You may run into a vendor that may urge you to deploy in their cloud data center and break away from your architecture plans to align your core business applications into the same public cloud data center. Other vendors may have a monthly payment subscription-only policy at odds with your organization's defined lump sum, time-defined budget.

How Mitel can help: Mitel has the right communications solutions for you — available in an unmatched breadth of deployment options — so you can make the architectural choice that best meets your unique needs. Maintaining control of their architecture, release updates, maintenance windows, and compliance is business-critical for many organizations. For others, aligning their communications architecture to other business applications is very important. Mitel’s strategy is to ensure you don’t need to make tradeoffs between having a leading communications solution and the deployment architecture you need to facilitate their business. We ensure you have both. This strategy means:

• You can deploy Mitel solutions in public, private clouds, or via traditional on-site deployment.
• You don’t have to choose between today and tomorrow. Mitel creates a bridge so you can build onto existing on-site solutions and grow through cloud deployments while continuing to stay current with your legacy deployment. We can also help you migrate entirely to a dedicated instance cloud solution.
• Mitel also builds bridges if your organization wants to align your communications with other technology investments. Our extensive enterprise application integrations make it easy to add Mitel collaboration, voice, mass notification, and other communications capabilities to create best-in-class workflows that boost productivity, improve the customer experience, and support regulatory compliance.
• Once a solution decision is made, Mitel provides you with the choice to consume solutions through monthly recurring payments or one-time CapEx licensing, whichever best fits their financial requirements. 

Exercise Your Power to Have Your Communications, Your Way

As your business creates its own operational new normal, you’ll need a communications and collaboration foundation that adapts to your needs. Mitel provides leading communications and collaboration platforms with unparalleled deployment and purchasing flexibility. This unique mix caters to the range of unique communications considerations you may have. So, exercise your power of choice and talk to Mitel today!