Ah, the final quarter of 2018, when everyone is scrambling to spend their end-of-year IT budgets while simultaneously making critical decisions about the year to come. Even with the pleasant holiday season to enjoy, there’s an overwhelming pressure to make good choices right off the bat in 2019 — and there’s a lot of them to make.
With so much to assess, it can be easy to overlook where your communication technology providers might be failing your company. Could you be missing a perfect solution, doomed to be stuck with what you have all year?
This is a situation you want to avoid.
If you think it’s time to look for a better match, here are the questions you need to consider.
Data
If your company’s internet connection is underachieving, it’s costing you more than just a few annoyed employees.
Failed financial transactions, limited access to the internet and platform errors are all issues that can arise from shaky internet — and these are issues that cost your business money.
Consider the following questions when deciding if you should stick with your provider or seek out another:
- Did your business experience internet outages this year? How many? For how long?
- Do employees complain about the connection dropping?
- How much did that downtime cost your business?
- Whose fault was the downtime?
- Was your provider helpful when your business was scrambling to get the connection back up?
While these questions may be obvious, many businesses don’t take the time to answer them. They instead live with data providers that aren’t reliable, and as a result, the company suffers.
Team Collaboration
Internal team collaboration tools have become a major productivity asset for businesses over the past ten years. These essential tools dictate how employees interact with each other to solve problems.
Team collaboration technology is always evolving, so it can be easy to overlook a brand-new solution that actually makes more sense for your organization. Here are some questions to keep in mind when you’re evaluating your team collaboration platform:
- Were employees able to communicate with each other easily? Were there miscommunications?
- Did your team collaboration platforms ever hinder projects?
- Does your platform’s price make sense for the size of our organization? Is there a better option for [small/medium/large] businesses?
- Is your tech nearing its end of life?
- Is your current contract expiring within six months? Are there end of the year deals to take advantage of?
Research is key. If your organization is okay with the current solution, that’s a good start — but it’s worth making sure there aren’t other solutions that can make a positive difference for your team. Discovering the better platform a year or two late only highlights the cost of not making the switch sooner.
Voice
Your company’s Telephone makes up the most important systems in your organization. If customers can’t call your company, valuable businesses opportunities are missed and relationships are damaged. If your system is underperforming, there’s a significant cost to the business that isn’t being considered.
Pose these questions to your IT team:
- How did your phone system perform this year?
- Were calls dropped? How often?
- Transferring issues? Did customers call back saying their call went nowhere?
- Did your provider help with any problems? Were they responsive?
- Does this provider work well with our business size? Do they put us second?
Anything less than perfect with your voice service is a concern, and if your provider isn’t proactively fixing issues, they should be dropped. Although changing your provider is a hassle, it’s worth it to your business if there’s a better solution.
How to Save Time
Evaluating all of your providers isn’t something that’s done in a day. Analyzing each vendor and their services is a time-consuming effort — a fact which usually leads to the activity being put off and overlooked.
It doesn’t have to be. What if there was a way for you to thoroughly vet your existing providers and evaluate potential ones too, all with as little work as possible on your end? That’s where we come in.
Bandwidth Simplified will evaluate all of your communication technology providers, determine where there are inefficiencies and make solution recommendations while you take care of the busy end of the year work on your plate.
Sound useful? Head here to reach out and our team will be in touch.