When it comes to operating your business, it is always important to effectively communicate with your company’s stakeholders. Whilst widespread working from home is expected to continue through 2021, it is even more critical to keep in touch with stakeholders no matter where they are.
What is a stakeholder?
Stakeholders are independent parties that have an interest in a business. They can either have the ability to affect the company or be affected by its business. Examples of primary stakeholders include employees, customers, suppliers, and investors.
Have a communication plan
Before you start, make sure that you have a communications plan. The worst thing you can do is have communications that do not follow a unified message. Work out what you want to say, and how you want your message to come across. Then you can begin to plan how you can communicate this in the most efficient way.
Schedule meetings in advance
If you need to have meetings with investors whilst working from home, make sure to plan. Working from home brings with it a level of unpredictability that you have probably already experienced. Therefore it is a good idea to send out an invite, perhaps by email, in advance. Organising using something like Google calendar allows you to send invites through email, and automatically adds the event to your calendar once the recipient responds.
Remote conference call
Now that you’ve scheduled your meeting, you can do this by doing a conference call. This allows you to get multiple people onto one call, be it, employees and investors, communicating your message clearly and efficiently through one call. Conference calls can be done either via voice call or video call.
One-on-one calls
When it comes to your customers or a conference call isn’t appropriate, it might make more sense to do a one-on-one call. Calls like this allow you to communicate more personally, dealing with individual inquiries rather than one large problem, for example in customer services or a call center.
Having an effective customer services strategy is important as it will help you to provide a consistent customer experience. This should improve customer satisfaction, which will help your business to grow.
Unified communications
Your business communications system can really increase in performance by using unified communications. Unified communications streamline multiple communications platforms into one, easy to use package.
Unified communications are usually operated through a single app or web portal, allowing your employees to work wherever they are in the world. This means you can work from home with little to no impact on your working day.
With this ease of usage comes increased employee productivity, which in turn brings improved customer experience. All in all, unified communications can truly transform your customer service strategy.
Throughout this unprecedented time, it is more important than ever to communicate effectively with all your stakeholders. With these simple tips, you will be sure to improve your communication, providing a consistent message across all channels.