Comms challenges for businesses and charities

Businesses and non-profit bodies both rely on effective communication systems throughout their organisations.

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Legacy systems, often structured around the soon to be obsolete ISDN telephone connection, are often clunky, outdated, and inflexible.

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In our modern times, with remote working now a reality across many sectors, the question is, how can we overcome comm challenges to remain agile in this changing era.

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Remote work has split comms providers in two, becoming either innovative or apathetic. Both have challenges. Large comms companies often rely on rigid contracts between them and their clients and therefore have little desire to change the current state of play.

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Other providers, such as Agile Comms, respond to the challenges with innovative solutions. Sometimes, these can be as simple as allowing clients shorter-term contracts to enable easy change and educating customers in their opportunities to embrace new technology.

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I was lucky enough to talk to Ollie Jackman from Agile to discuss this in a little detail and here are some of the points that came out of the conversation.

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Comms in the charity sector

Smart thinking about the necessary comms systems for an organisation can result in significant financial savings. For example, one organisation that Ollie talked to, provided mobile phones to 850 members of staff, yet each is likely to possess their own devices.

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Rather than continue this practice every couple of years, conversations with employees would most likely yield positive results, with them willing to have internal emails download onto their phone or allow the installation of a softphone into their device.

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This has the impact of saving the charity thousands of pounds of charity money on phones and airtime contracts and boosting their green credentials.

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These changes don’t just apply to charities, of course. Businesses, large and small, can only benefit from cheaper, greener solutions that provide them with the scope to alter their plans rapidly.

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Flexibility in the comms industry

The idea of allowing flexibility in terms of services provided and length of contract may not sound groundbreaking, but the truth is that the comms industry has been, for a long time, focused on locking clients into systems that are traditional, simple to understand and therefore are highly in-flexible.

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Little time has been given to thinking about what value can be added to the comms packages that are in use. Do businesses and charities need reflexibility to cope with changing needs? Well the answer from Ollie is obviously, they do, especially with what we have seen over the last two years. But they also do not want to pay high fees for flexibility that they may not have needed in more certain times.

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“in communications, it feels like everyone is trying to make customers ‘sticky’ and tying them into long contracts.”

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The Covid pandemic has changed the way we work, for better or worse, and many businesses are finding it hard to convince their workforce to come back to the office.

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Many businesses have had to find in-house solutions to allow their staff to work from home. Their traditional comms suppliers concentrate on providing services in just one location, the office. This is where companies like Ollie’s team at Agile Comms come in.

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Giving the flexibility to grow or shrink a comms system contract, handing some element of control to the client, opens exciting conversations. In the end, it is not the contract that will keep a client; instead, it is how you deal with the clients that will breed success.

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If you want to find out more about how you can have a more flexible approach to comms, then I would thoroughly recommend just picking the phone up (I know) and having a chat!

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Ollie can be reached on 01752 914261 or 07999 760543

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