Hello, my name is Ryan Smith and I lead the SMB customer segment for our Product Marketing Team at Mitel.
There’s one of the things that we talk a lot about, and we create this differentiation between a standard business and a high-performance business. And when you start looking at what makes a growing business a high-performance business, I think that there are probably four things that larger, enterprise-grade types of businesses do that small businesses or growing businesses now have access to the technology to allow them to do.
1. Communicate from anywhere by adopting a mobile-first philosophy.
All they need is an internet connection and they have access to all of the resources and to all of the people that they need. Something we call mobile-first.
2. Improve response times with internal team collaboration.
One of the things that can really stifle the ability for a growing business to respond is what’s called response latency. So how long does it take for me, a sales person, to find and get a response back from the person that is my subject matter expert. In a growing business, that could be the owner. If I have a sales person in the field that needs to get something with the owner, the length of time that it takes to get a response could be the difference between closing business and not. In order to reduce that latency then what we want to do is have team collaboration that’s internal. That connects everyone so that if they are mobile, if they are remote, that there is a unifying point that brings them together so that communication can have occurred very quickly.
3. Implement modern customer experience tools.
The ability to increase that customer experience and improve it to such a way that now what happens is the growing business presents itself as a much larger enterprise, more well established. So that means having the ability to have the IVRs, having call distribution, skills based routing, all of those things within their organization so that when someone calls and even if you’re a ten-person shop, you have all of that technology that allows them to do this.
4. Utilize business analytics to drive decision making.
And then finally, beginning to refine yourself around business analytics and using how your communication system is working and what times the calls are coming in. Using that to begin to make better, more informed decisions using data because if you look at one of the things that larger businesses do is they often times make decisions based upon what data they have available to them. When you’re a growing business and you begin to refine and develop a discipline around using business analytics and data to make decisions about resource planning, then you’re well on your way to becoming this high-performance company that is sustainable in spite of what growing businesses encounter as this stat of growing businesses that fail over the course of five or 10 years.
So those are the things that I think when you look at growing businesses, those are the things that they absolutely need to do if they are going to be able to compete and present as a much larger business to customers.
