When many companies select a new communications platform, they primarily focus on the voice and video aspect of their company’s communications. In reality, there are many different modes of communication, and when organisations prioritise communications, barriers are eliminated in the work place. One under-used solution is chat. Many of us consider chat to be a tool used for personal or recreational use, but when it’s implemented in the work place, chat has demonstrated that it is a powerful tool in any company’s communications arsenal. Enabling company-wide conversations via chat can benefit your company in several ways.
Seamless Collaboration between Onsite and Offsite Employees
In this day and age, it’s not unusual for companies to have employees working from a variety of locations, whether it’s due to employee travel, nation-wide locations, multiple campuses, or a remote culture. Whatever the reason, your employees need to have easy access to multiple means of communication to stay productive. Chat works to promote seamless collaboration because it allows employees to chat from a desktop application or via their mobile phone. Chat also provides a method to communicate quickly and efficiently on the little things, saving time on questions and information gathering, as well as increasing their efficiency.
Easily Referenced Chat History
Most employees have many projects on their plate at once, with a lot of moving pieces to keep each project going. Recalling the details of each project and the facets of each quick conversation can be difficult. One of the strongest benefits of chat is that it provides an automatic chat history. This allows for employees to review the conversation, allowing them to find the answers to problems they’ve already solved, without having to reach out to their colleagues again. Chat history can also be used for record keeping and accountability. In regards to record keeping, managers can review what was agreed upon on a project, what tasks have already been completed, what has already be tried, and how performance is going.
Break Down Language Barriers with Text
Language barriers can exist for a lot of reasons and they are often difficult to circumnavigate. One of the best solutions is to communicate via a text solution, which allows one-on-one communications to be in real-time, but not necessarily spoken. Chat allows the ability for all international counterparts to quickly and easily communicate, which allows for easy clarification when confusion occurs and for operations to run more smoothly.
Improves Customer Services through Simultaneous Communication
A key challenge for many customer services teams is staying engaged with customers throughout a phone call. For instance, during a call, a representative may need to reach out to colleague for support or information, which will require putting the customer on hold or calling them back. Chat eliminates this issue and improves customer engagement by allowing simultaneous conversation. For instance, if the customer service representative runs into a problem or needs assistance while they are on a call, they can use chat to quickly communicate with their colleagues to solve the problem while staying on the phone with the customer. This simple solution will provide your company with a handful of benefits. Even your newest and most inexperienced employees will be able to be brought up to speed quickly, all employees will appear to be more knowledgeable and responsive to your customers, and every employee will have access to faster resources. Due to these things, your customer service will go through the roof.
The Advantage of Unified Communications
Now that you understand the value of chat, it’s time to decide how to implement chat within your company. But, picking just any chat provider won’t do. To get the best results from using chat in your company, it’s best to opt for chat as part of a Unified Communications (UC) Platform. UC refers to providing all of your communications applications through one provider. Popular UC tools allow employees to use a single application to flip between voice, video, chat, presence, and audio conferencing; whatever communication tool it takes to get the job done. The single device can be desktop or mobile. The benefit of selecting a chat tool that is part of a UC platform is that chat will already be part of your communications eco system. Employees will have the benefit of being able to use the same interface for all of their communications and will receive a consistent experience. They’ll also be more likely to use chat because it is right there in front of them. Using chat as part of a UC platform also eliminates the need for training across multiple platforms and increases efficiency by keeping employees in a single communication platform.